Makers’ voices: four themes for material literacy in contemporary sculpture

Abstract

Material has come to be acknowledged as an important source of political and social meaning due to recent philosophical debates concerning "material agency" (Gell 1998;Latour 2005;Coole and Frost 2010;Bennett 2010;Behar 2016). This has clear implications for art: it explores the effects material has on human behaviour and vice versa. In contrast, art criticism commonly positions material as secondary to metaphysical interpretation. Critics such as Krauss (1979) andLippard (1997;Lippard and Chandler 2015) avoid analysing material's multiple sources of information. As a result, we as viewers are ill-equipped to examine the meanings it embodies. This paper presents sculpture as an appropriate framework from which to engage with this problem, as it remains a discipline which creatively explores material in three-dimensional space (Tucker 1981). Four themes have been developed from the analysis of qualitative interviews carried out with eight emerging UK sculptors in order to work towards "material literacy" (Lehmann 2016) in contemporary art practice.