Intersentient States: A Foundational Note

© David Barrow 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Intersentient States: A foundational note. David Barrow Professor Emeritus, School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF24 1AA, Wales, UK. [email protected] || [email protected] || www.davidbarrowstudio.com Abstract This brief statement outlines work in progress on the concept of Intersentient States. This term describes the conditions of shared and/or reciprocal awareness that may evolve between material forms, maker, and viewers. It suggests that artworks may participate in perception rather than merely receive it. Drawing upon vessels, sculpted heads, and paintings from my own practice, the concept proposes a material poetics of relation, where attention becomes distributed across object and observer. While the concept has philosophical affinities with new materialism and phenomenology, it arises directly from my studio experience. This short article serves to chronicle authorship and announce this conceptual field ahead of a forthcoming, peer-reviewed paper. Keywords: Intersentient States; intersentience; material perception; relational aesthetics; agentive matter; ceramics; embodied cognition; Carlo Scarpa; Hans Coper; Shōji Kamoda; Elisabeth Frink; Elizabeth Fritsch, Gordon Baldwin. Main Text This phrase, Intersentient States, names a field of relation, not a theory. It refers to times when perception feels shared, when material, maker, and beholder seem harmonised within a single, mutable awareness. The term intersentient extends beyond intersubjective. It does not depend on consciousness between persons but acknowledges that attention itself can be enabled through form. The origin of this idea lies in making. Returning to full-time ceramics after decades in experimental science, I recognised familiar dynamics - systems held at threshold, tensions between containment and release, matter poised between phases. In the studio these principles become perceptual. Clay seemed to listen; surfaces recorded their own histories; a vessel behaved as though aware of its weight in the room. I use the term agentive to describe this sensation that an artwork participates in such encounters. I have sensed this too in the works of others: in Hans Coper’s compressed volumes, Gordon Baldwin’s weathered bowls, and Elizabeth Fritsch’s rhythmic groupings, where vessels appear to listen to one another across space. Each articulates presence as something reciprocal — a stillness that acts back upon the viewer. The Tribute sculptures of Elisabeth Frink embody a parallel charge, their poised forms transmitting awareness as much as form. Likewise, Carlo Scarpa’s architectures seem cut to fit memory rather than utility; his apertures, thresholds, and suspended geometries shape how perception moves. My own vessels and heads follow that lineage of attention. They inhabit sentience rather than depict it. Within this framework, Intersentient States describes how form holds relation, and are not metaphors for consciousness. A vessel too resolved can lose attentiveness; an unfinished surface can remain receptive. Grouped together, such works may sometimes form resonant configurations - spatial ecologies where objects appear to listen to one another. In such charged proximities, perception becomes plural. © David Barrow 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Parallels with scientific practice remain close. In both domains, understanding emerges through both experiment and observation. This continuity between disciplines is captured by Arthur Koestler’s notion of bisociation, which hypothesised that creative thought is born from the collision of distinct frames. Recent neurocognitive studies now suggest that artistic and scientific insight share the same underlying neural circuitry, demonstrated by the dynamic interplay between imaginative and evaluative networks and mediated by neurochemical modulators such as dopamine. Whether composing a score, designing an experiment, or shaping a vessel, the act of creation seems to draw upon the same physiological substrate of curiosity and reward. To call a work intersentient is therefore to describe an epistemic event, where perception is distributed across matter and mind. The studio becomes both the site and instrument of enquiry. Each form, whether a leaning sculpted head, a composite vessel, or a muted painting, records not expression but attention held in material. These are not objects of representation but thresholds of awareness. The ethical dimension is quiet but present. Recognising material as participant, rather than a passive medium, invites a slower, more reciprocal form of seeing. It aligns with Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter and Karen Barad’s intra-action. These are frameworks in which agency emerges through relation, not dominance. Intersentient States therefore proposes an aesthetic ecology - one that values presence over assertion, and listening over display. This note cannot encompass the full articulation of the concept, which will appear in expanded form elsewhere. Its purpose is to register the term, indicate its origins in practice, and suggest its philosophical reach. Intersentient States designates those fragile conditions in which material, maker, and beholder share perception - each shaping the other within a field of mutual regard. Conclusion To speak of Intersentient States is to admit that awareness may flicker wherever matter is arranged to receive it. In such moments, art is less an object than an event of co-presence - something that happens between the maker, the material, and whoever stands before it. Author’s Note on Transparency This text was developed from my own writing and reflections, with the assistance of an adaptive generativelanguage system used solely for editorial refinement. All ideas, examples, and frameworks originate from my personal research and artistic practice. Selected References 1. Koestler A. The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964). 2. Bennett J. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 3. Barad K. Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 4. McCarter R. Carlo Scarpa (London: Phaidon Press, 2013), pp. 10–15, 78–85. 5. Whiting D. Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape. York Art Gallery, 2012. 6. Robertson B. Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture (London: Harpvale Books, 1984). 7. Dormer P. & Cripps D. Elizabeth Fritsch (London: Bellew, 1985). 8. Birks T. Hans Coper (London: Collins, 1983). 9. Inumaru T. & Morita K. Kamoda Shōji: A Prominent Figure in Contemporary Ceramics (Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art and Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 1987), pp. 81, 83, 152, 157. Citation Barrow, David. Intersentient States: A Foundational Note. Zenodo (2025). 10.5281/zenodo.17502814 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0