I remember dropping out of my A-levels with a sense of angst about where to take my life. I enjoyed the process of making, but struggled to articulate why at the time. I was fortunate to find the Building Crafts College, where I was introduced to craft and carving. On my first day, at 18, I remember standing in front of a bust of Plato, fraught with the thought of changing my life for the better.
As the second son in a family led by a mother who migrated from Nigeria with hopes of raising doctors and lawyers, I was already veering away from an expected path. My father’s absence meant our home was shaped by a kind of domestic matriarchy, while the world outside still felt structured by male authority.
At that time, I felt an innate need to understand myself. Working with my hands and translating ideas into 3D form, offered a way to do that. Through making, I began to let go of the need to intellectually define everything, opening instead to a different kind of understanding.
In The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (2021), it is argued that
“Long practice and accumulated experiences progressively fine-tune the craftsperson’s somatic perception to the present task, enabling the confident performance and the rapid, responsive recalibration of the tool-wielding body that qualifies the ‘expert’” (p.211)
This idea of somatic perception suggests that repeated bodily engagement reshapes how we experience the world. Rather than passively representing reality, perception is enacted through movement, touch, and material response. Our sensitivity to texture, sound, and resistance becomes a form of knowledge. Concepts like repetition become more important as we start to see that repeated bodily engagement can form a highly trained sensitivity.
In my own work, this developed as a sensitivity to stone. More recently, through my work in cinema, I’ve explored similar processes with sculptors working across wood, textiles, digital textures, and bio-based materials. Setting the specific material aside for a moment, what interests me here is the mind–body connection. Contemporary approaches to epistemology often situate knowledge within systems of logic, mathematics, and science. In contrast, I want to consider the role of craft in mediating the relationship between mind and body.
Take craft tools as an example: a tungsten‑tipped chisel. Phenomenologists such as Merleau‑Ponty describe how tools can “withdraw” from conscious awareness and become incorporated into our body schema. In this state, the locus of perception shifts outward into the tool itself. As with the example of a blind person’s cane, the tool is no longer experienced as separate, but as an extension of the body; similarly, the craftsperson comes to perceive through the chisel and the stone it encounters.
My commitment to crafts should be understood as a commitment to knowledge production. Over time, through repeated engagement and material‑focused research, my beliefs about the causes of my experiences and about what counts as success or failure become guided by craft knowledge. This evolving framework for understanding is what I think of as Thinking Thru Sculpture.
Reading: The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work
