March uses sculpting to dismantle the hylomorphic image of creativity in which a preformed mental idea is imposed upon passive matter. Through close phenomenological attention to working with clay, he describes agency as mutable, distributed and occasionally difficult to locate: form arises through recursive interaction among hand, eye, body and material rather than from unilateral command. Material Engagement Theory supplies the conceptual framework, while the studio becomes an investigative apparatus in which thinking is externally visible. The iconic idea is material conceptualisation: clay does not merely receive thought but participates in its emergence, allowing sense and form to develop together before linguistic stabilisation. March’s methodological operation is unusually productive because first-person making is used to test a theory of cognition rather than simply illustrate it. The paper bridges sculpture, phenomenology and extended-mind theory by treating creative action as a systemic process in which the boundary between self, material and idea becomes temporarily permeable.
