This body of work developed while I was studying sensorimotor art therapy and clay field work, during a period when affect was worked directly into matter through pressure and duration. It began as a way of staying with bodily sensation through bilateral action, rhythm and contact, before I had language for what the work was doing. The practice extended over several years, evolving as both an embodied method and a material research thread.

Clay was approached as a permeable field rather than a sculptural medium. Drawing from clayfield therapy but moving beyond its clinical frame, I worked with bilateral, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive processes to engage sensory overload, fragmentation and surplus signal. The work was not oriented toward expression or representation, but toward translation, affect and record.

Two movements structured the practice.

One was excavatory. Clay was worked to draw out embedded affect, residual memory and pre-verbal patterning through repetitive bilateral handling. These works were externalised as dense, mutable objects that could be encountered outside the body. This strand of the work was exhibited at Yarra Gallery, Federation Square, where the forms operated as condensations of bodily information rather than symbolic figures.

The other movement was embedment. Clay was used as a site for lodging affect, intention and bodily state directly into matter. Through prolonged contact, pressure and duration, information was materially encoded rather than symbolically inscribed. These works functioned as speculative recording devices and storage objects. Many were not exhibited, but held in reserve as instruments rather than resolved artworks.

Hands were central throughout the practice. Multiple works involved moulding, pressing and embedding hands into clay in varied configurations. The hand was treated as a site of haptic intelligence and agency, capable of generating its own language through touch, pressure and bilateral action. Clay retained these encounters as density, contour and internal structure.

Archaeoacoustic thinking underpinned the work. Clay was understood as a recording medium capable of holding pressure, duration and bodily state as latent information. Cavities, impressions and enclosed volumes were shaped so that matter itself became a site of listening. When held to the ear, these forms returned sound shaped by their internal histories. What was encountered was not a recording in the conventional sense, but resonance altered by prior contact.

The practice also extended into durational and intimate processes. At times, clay was placed beneath my head while sleeping, functioning as a record keeper for dream-state and non-verbal affect. These actions treated clay as a storage medium for information that could not yet be interpreted. The objects were conceived as temporal cassettes, intended to be encountered again if and when an adequate interpretive apparatus might exist.

This body of work became foundational for later projects that extended its listening and recording logics beyond clay. It directly informed This is the sound of me holding your hand loving you (2018) and the Analogue Environmental Sound Synthesiser, developed with Ross Annels for Floating Land (2019), where the logic of material memory and prosthetic listening expanded to environmental scale.

In parallel, and beginning during this period, the conceptual and methodological foundations for Book of Receivings emerged alongside this clay-based research (c. 2014). Early transmission devices were informed by the same questions of how affect and sensory information might be imparted into material and later retrieved. Matter was treated as a communicative substrate rather than a neutral carrier.

Across the practice, clay and earth functioned as both archive and collaborator. Bilateral making allowed pre-verbal pattern knowledge to guide form, while material held the trace of those exchanges. The resulting works operate as time-based records rather than representations, carrying bodily information forward without requiring immediate legibility.