Thinking with My Hands: Embodied Cognition in Practice

Abstract The act of reflection is often considered to be one of the conscious mind – a cognitive act reflecting on one’s lived experience. By adopting principles of reflection defined by Donald Schön in 1983 as reflection-in and reflection-on action, this positioning paper attempts to develop a new methodology for examining and reinterpreting the embodied nature of material reflective thinking. The practice discussed responds to and reinterprets walking acts through methods of stitching-in and stitching-on action. The stitched mark acts as a line that considers concepts of wandering minds, wandering bodies and embodied cognition (Candy 2020). Correlations of mind and body wandering through physical and metaphorical space will be drawn on and considered in the context of material thinking and tacit and haptic knowledge. Schön (1983:73) asks the question, ‘In practice of various kinds, what form does reflection-in-action take?’, through this paper I intend to explore what critical-reflective-creative-thinking looks like in a textile practice and examine how the moment of making (stitching/walking) offers opportunities for critical-reflective-creative-thinking with practice.