The Self-Isolation Residency 11th may 2020: Day 43

Exploring Sculpture No. 5: 'Sculpture and plinth, found objects, 2009, Antony Clarkson

What is a sculpture?  There is an old joke told by painters that 'a sculpture is the thing you fall over in an art gallery when you step back to admire a painting'. In simple terms sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in 3 dimensional space. This might not be a very deep 3 dimensional space, bas-relief  is considered a form of sculpture in which the carved figures are attached to a background and only stand very slightly proud of that ground. But generally speaking we tend to think of a sculpture as being on object which occupies a 3 dimensional space, an object that we have to walk around to gain the full experience from.

Sculptures come in many shapes and sizes, there are of course many examples of life (or even larger than life) size human figures in sculpture, but there are also a great many smaller objects to be considered in the field. How then does an artist present a sculpture to its observers for its best viewing advantage? The answer ids through the usage of a plinth. Originally an an architectural device, a plinth is fundamentally the base of a column, the plinth in sculptural terms acts as a presentation device, lifting the object in question up to share the same space as the viewer. This raising of the piece can in turn lead to giving a piece of sculpture, even an abstract piece, an anthropomorphic nature, in other words we imbue the form with a human-like nature. This process of anthropomorphism in sculpture is an area that interests me greatly and is something that I explore a little in the above piece, 'Sculpture and plinth' but that I went onto explore to greater depth in other pieces that I will discuss in future posts, especially in 'Self portrait with Jenga'.

'Sculpture and plinth' is a piece that, although it does have suggestions of humanity about it is much more about a sculptures relationship to the plinth in stands on. In this piece in was my intention to explore several sculptural areas, obviously the first is the relationship between the sculpture and the plinth, but the second and not unconnected area is that of how materials function. 'Sculpture and plinth' is actually created from a found set of file drawers, nothing else. The drawers are removed from their casement, which is then turned over to create the plinth and the drawers are then balanced one on top of the other on to the plinth. There are no fixings, the piece relies entirely on balance. This usage of all of the parts of the file drawers and nothing else is important for me in its relationship to traditional sculpture. If you think of a figure caved from stone it is exactly the same, it just uses the one material. But there is also an interesting difference if relationship to the two forms of sculpture. The two basic forms of sculpture are 'subtractive', one starts with a 'mass', a block of stone or wood, and one removes portions of the mass to 'reveal the form inside'. The other form is of course 'additional', pieces are attached together to make a new form, found objects for instance. This piece is of course falls into this latter category as the elements are combined to make a new form, but does it really? The elements are of course all part of the original whole, just as in the block of stone or wood, nothing else, not even glue or welding is added. For me this raises an interesting question and no, I'm not going to try to answer it right now.