Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into 3D items. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A variety of media may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or purely shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed brand that applies to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and changes and continually extends the range of forms and evolving new kinds of objects. The definition of the term was much wider in the latter half of the 20th century than what it had been just two or three decades before, and in the evolving state of the visual arts at the dawn of the 21st century, one cannot predict what its future possibilities are going to be.
There are certain features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to the art of sculpture but are not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. At the start of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional works of art began to be common practice.
Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture – the voids and hollows within and between its solid areas – have usually been to some extent an intricate part of the design, but the role was blatantly secondary. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has widened, and the spatial elements have started to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a commonly accepted area of the art form.
It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, except for works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With recent developements of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can still be considered fundamental to the definition of the art.
Finally, sculpture since the 20th century has not been limited to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because contemporary sculptors use any materials and methods of manufacture that they want, the art can no longer be identified by any particular materials or techniques.
With all this evolution, there is probably just one thing that remains constant in the art of sculpture, and it exists as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a field of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of items in 3-D.
Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached object in its own right, with a similar independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not possess this independance. It is part of and projects from or is an inextricable part of something else that serves either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from whence it projects.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in certain respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not conjure the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we see in a painting. Sculpture does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied to the pictorial arts. Forms of sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate different forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as firstly an art of touch and that the originating roots of sculptural art can be tracked to the pleasure we experience in fondling things.
All three-D forms are considered as possessing an expressive character along with their purely geometric properties. They are viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, the artist is able to create visual images in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. These images may go beyond the simplistic presentation of fact and create a wide range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material used is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what already exists in the endless worlds of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a vast range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, realise something of its structural and expressive aspects and develop emotional responses to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitive response, often called a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that this art primarily appeals.
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