The boundary of "I"

I was thinking about how a certain shape is carved upon the surface of wood and got wondering how I could envision what might be a sort of mental-physical-emotional dynamic that moves between the way we formulate a shape in our mind and feel it in our body and the way that shape slowly emerges within a piece of wood... 

How might any sort of connection being made from the mind to our hands to our movements to the surface and what might be extended to the "essence" of the wood be conceptualized?

Well, I started to explore if there has been any research done in this area, found some research on primitive tool use, and got enthralled with some of the writings that were exploring the question of who the "conscious individuals" were who for instance shaped the first hand axes out of stone.

Within an exploration of a question about self-consciousness (when did man begin to regard himself as the source of his own decisions), there was an interesting suggestion that "...the boundary of this ‘I’ may be changeable and extendable to the outside world rather than fixed at the surface of the skin..."

When working with wood, using a knife, saw, chisel, sandpaper, file or whatever means of "tending that wood towards a sense of a self-imagined shape, there is always that self being projected upon that solidity.  How much is translated over?