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 and sociological debates concerning ‘material agency', particularly linked to theorists such as Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett. 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 Rosalind Krauss and Lucy Lippard 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. Four themes have been developed from the analysis of qualitative interviews carried out with eight emerging UK sculptors in order to work towards a condition of ‘material literacy’ in contemporary art practice.