Just visited human ethologist Ellen Dissanayake’s website, and came across these brilliant quotes.

Her book “What is Art For?” was a powerful inspiration during my doctoral research when I was re-thinking notions of instrumentality in art practice, and looking to understand my own practice in relation to more encompassing view of the history of art and culture that looks beyond the narrow (and historically anomalous) scope of 20th century Western art history and aesthetics.

“We can begin a discussion of artmaking by noting that from very early (as long ago as 200,000 years), humans have been naturally attracted to the extraordinary as a dimension of experience and that at some point they seem also to have been moved to make the ordinary extraordinary—that is, to shape or elaborate everyday, mundane reality and thereby transform it into something special, different from the everyday.”

“Craft is ineluctably grounded in the life of the body, the physicality of material and material objects—their feel, their weight, their resistance, their fragility or durability.”

“At the core of ritual and art as I have described them is the emotional intersubjectivity developed and practiced in mother-infant interaction. Making and making special are inseparable from the innate human impulse to share feelings and from the need and ability to express ourselves in relationship with others. And we experience the works of others intersubjectively also. The gestural traces in handmade objects, like the bodily signatures in dance and song, contribute directly to another’s reception or appreciation of them.”

“For the perceiver, a made object implies not only a hand, but a person with hands—someone mortal like ourselves who fashioned this object, brought it into being.”