Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into three-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. An unlimited variety of material are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials will be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or purely shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed branding that is applicable to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and changes and continually extends the range of forms and evolving new designs of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the latter part of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades prior, and in the fluid state of visual art at the start of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future extensions are likely to become.
Certain features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the sculpturing art but are now no longer present in a big part of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of the definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; imitating forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. From the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that figures of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D artworks began to be common practice.
Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid forms — have always been to some degree an integral part of any design, but their role was unacknowledged. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the attention has shifted, and the spatial roles have started to become dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a generally recognisable area of sculpture.
It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, excepting objects such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With modern developments of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can any longer be regarded as essential to the art.
Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century was not limited to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that modern sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that work, sculpture can no longer be identified with any particular materials or techniques.
During all this change, there is probably only one area that stayed constant in sculpture, and it endures as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a part of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of objects in 3D.
Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached piece in its own right, leading the same kind of independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not exist in this kind of independence. It is part of and projects from or is an innate part of some object that might serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it emerges.
The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot cast the illusion of space with solely optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. Sculpture does possess a reality, a vivid physical presence that simply cannot be found in the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate some pieces of sculpture. It was, in fact, pressed by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural art can be tracked to the pleasure we experience in doing so.
All 3D forms are seen as exhibiting an expressive character along with their pure geometric properties. They may be viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. This visual imagery may go beyond the simple presentation of fact and demand a near endless range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material for this art is, so to speak, the complete realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture may draw upon what we know exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a huge 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-dimensional form, know something of its structural and expressive properties and develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of understanding and sensitive response, often called a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that the art of sculpture primarily appeals.
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