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Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into three-dimensional items. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts enveloping the spectator. A variety of materials may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials are carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed label that can be applied to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that is growing and is changing and continually extends the range of forms and evolving new designs of objects. The definition of the term was much wider in the second half of the 20th century than what it had been just two or three decades previously, and in the everchanging state of art at the start of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future possibilities are going to see.

There are certain features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to the art of sculpture but are no longer present in a large part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of the definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, that were mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. Since the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that the forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings can be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional art began to be created.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture – the voids and hollows inside and between its solid forms – have generally been to some kind of degree an intricate part of its design, but this role was secondary. In a large area of modern sculpture, however, the attention has broadened, and the spatial elements have come to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a commonly acceptable field of the art.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, except for pieces such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can remain to be considered fundamental to defining sculpture.

Additionally, sculpture during the 20th century was not confined to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to the traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As today’s sculptors use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve a purpose, the definition of the art can no longer be identified for the use of any particular materials or techniques.

After all these changes, there is probably just one element that has remained constant in sculpture, and it endures as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of works in 3D.

Sculpture can be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached piece in its own right, with an independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture in relief does not exist in this reality. It projects from and is attached to or is an integral part of some other object that might serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from whence it projects.

The actual three-D nature of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in some respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space with solely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we can see in painting. It does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied to 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 sense. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate some types of sculpture. It was, in fact, debated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as firstly an art of touch and that the first roots of sculptural sensibility can be traced to the pleasure one experiences in touching things.

All three-dimensional forms are considered as possessing an expressive character as well as purely geometric properties. They may strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on and so forth. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, artists are able to create visual images in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. Visual imagery can go beyond the mere presentation of fact and create a vast range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material used here is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see that exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of genuine invention. It has been utilised to express a vast range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the most violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of 3-D form, realise something of its structural and expressive elements and possess emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellect and response, known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that the art of sculpture primarily appeals.

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