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Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into 3-D items. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. An enormous variety of material can be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed name that applies to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new styles of objects. The scope of the term grew much wider in the later part of the 20th century than as it had been just two or three decades prior, and in the evolving state of art at the turn of the 21st century, one cannot predict what its future extensions are likely to become.

Certain features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to sculpture but are not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of the definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; imitating forms in life, most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D artworks began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid areas — have generally been to some kind of extent an integral part of the design, but the role was blatantly secondary. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the attention has deepened, and the spatial elements have come to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a wholly recognised area of the art form.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, except for objects such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), did not move. With the modern development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can any longer be viewed as fundamental to the art.

Additionally, sculpture in the 20th century was no longer restricted to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because modern sculptors may use any materials and methods of manufacture that they wish to, the definition of sculpture can no longer be identified for the use of any special kind of materials or techniques.

Through all this evolution, there is probably only one element that remained constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a part of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of form in three dimensions.

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

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot have the illusion of space with solely optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as painting might. But sculpture does possess a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate certain kinds of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as primarily an art of touch and that the first roots of sculptural work can be tracked to the pleasure that we experience in doing so.

All three-D forms are regarded as exhibiting an expressive character along with their purely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, the artist is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. This visual imagery may go beyond the simple presentation of fact and communicate a vast range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material used in sculpture is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-D form. A sculpture might draw upon what we know exists in the endless worlds of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of pure invention. It has been used to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the most violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of three-D form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and will possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellect and reaction, also known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art form primarily appeals.

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