The role of the skin in touch is to provide passages for intensities and affects to travel through. The skin is much more then a boundary, a soft outer tissue that protects the body against potentially harmful substances and excessive water loss. The skin is much more then a boundary, a soft outer tissue that protects the body against potentially harmful substances and excessive water loss. The skin is porous, it allows elements of otherness to pass through. ‘Porosity constitutes the body as a threshold or passage, not strictly defined by inside/outside but rather by multiple surfaces open to other surfaces’ (Fullagar, 2001, p.179).
Touching clay is a primal experience, it stimulates tactile input and tactile expression. Clay is a material that invites us to squueze it, poke it and to manipulate it in all kinds of was.
Clay is also used in family art therapy: 'when hands touch clay exteroceptors and interoceptors become naturally stimulated, and every movement of the hands provides instant feedback to the brain. Haptic perception allows non-verbal access to psychological and sensorimotor processes' (Elbrecht, 2014, p.19).
Touching clay is a textural experience. Clay, just as sand, provides a strong tactile, fully haptic stimulus of hands and fingers. Although the movement is initiated by the arm or hand, it is fully aborbing and a total sensory engagement (Peterson & Dodge, 2012).
Clay invites movements such as stroking, moulding, smoothing and kneeding.
Even more, clay leaves embodied traces of touch. Clay folds itself around the fingers and the hands. It imprints our touch.
Clay materializes our touch.
How do the fingers and the hands feel when they are touched by clay?
At first ithe clay perhaps feels cold, smooth and sticky. Then slowly the clay permeates into the skin and you feel the material gets tighter on your skin. At that point you feel how the clay starts soaking up natural oils. It feels as a band that is pulled too tightly around the arm and might even start to irritate you.
‘Touch is not graspable as a stable concept. The only thing we can grasp, momentarily, are touch’s inventions’ (Manning, 2007, p.xiv).
The skin is porous, it allows elements of otherness to pass through. ‘Porosity constitutes the body as a threshold or passage, not strictly defined by inside/outside but rather by multiple surfaces open to other surfaces’ (Fullagar, 2001, p.179).
‘Touch is to be understood synesthetically, operating along relational vectors always in dialogue with other senses (of which there are likely many more then five)’ (Manning, 2007, p.xiii).
‘The surface of the body is a thinking, feeling surface. It is a sensing skin that protects us while opening us toward and rendering us vulnerable to an other’ (Manning, 2007, p.9).