Aesthetic Production in Clay Molding: Mental and Dynamically Embodied Action Mediate Between Formal and Material Aspects of Experience

Abstract

Aesthetic production, that is, the processing of material with a focus on the experiential and formal qualities of resulting objects and the process itself, encompasses basic dimensions of art, creativity, craft, and design. To explore these dimensions, we propose the Rubicon model of action phases as a general framework. Additionally, we introduce Schiller's aesthetics as an interactive account of formal/mental and material/physical aspects of aesthetic production and derive testable hypotheses from it. First, we expect form- and material-related experience to converge over an aesthetic production task; second, we assume that physical and mental actions occur with different prevalence across the action phases. These hypotheses were strengthened in a quasi-experimental mixed-methods study on a clay-molding task in an educational real-world setting ( N = 30). The results suggest understanding aesthetic production as a dynamic intertwining of object-related and subject-related experience, action, and embodiment, which supports the transdisciplinary significance of aesthetic production for self-development.