What is Sculpture?

Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into three-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can range from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A massive variety of materials are 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 otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed name that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of forms and evolving new kinds of objects. The breadth of the term grew much wider in the second part of the 20th century than what it had been only two or three decades prior, and in the fluid state of visual art at the turn of the 21st century, one cannot predict what its future possibilities are likely to see.

Some features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to sculpture but are not present in a big part of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of the definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, that were mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. Since the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D art began to be created.

Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was considered essentially an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid forms — have generally been to some extent an inextricable part of the design, but this role was purely secondary. In a large area of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has widened, and the spatial roles have started to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a commonly acknowledged branch of the art form.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, excepting items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can remain to be considered to be fundamental to defining the art form.

Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century was not restricted to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to the traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that present-day sculptors may use any materials and methods of manufacture that they can, sculpture can no longer be identified by any particular kind of materials or techniques.

After all this change, there is probably only one aspect that stayed constant in the art form, and it endures as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a part of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of items in three dimensions.

Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached item in its own right, with an independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this independance. It projects from and is attached to or is an integral part of something else that serves either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it projects.

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in certain respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not cast the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as a painting can. It does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Different forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate different forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, pushed by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the beginnings of sculptural forms can be based on the pleasure one feels in doing this.

All 3D forms are perceived as having an expressive character along with pure geometric properties. They are seen by the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. This visual imagery may go beyond the mere presentation of fact and demand a vast range of subtle and powerful reactions.

The aesthetic raw material in the form is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive 3-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 mastered to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the terribly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, know something of its structural and expressive aspects and will possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellect and reaction, often called a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art of sculpture primarily appeals.

For art supplies Brisbane, including canvas art supplies and artists supplies, visit or call the Discount Art Warehouse. Become a member for free and get 10% discount on future purchases.