Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into 3D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A huge variety of material can be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may 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 set of activities. It is, rather, an art that grows and is changing and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new types of objects. The breadth of the term grew much wider in the second half of the 20th century than as it had been just two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of visual art at the beginning of the 21st century, one cannot predict what its future extensions are likely to see.

Certain features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to sculpture but are now no longer present in a great deal of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as a representational art; imitating forms in life, most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. From the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that the forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D works of art began to be created.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as fundamentally 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 parts — have usually been to some degree an integral part of any design, but the role was secondary. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has deepened, and the spatial elements have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a fully acceptable field of the art of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of objects such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With the contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can remain to be considered to be fundamental to the definition of sculpture.

Last, sculpture during the 20th century was no longer limited to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As present-day sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that they want, the definition of sculpture can no longer be identified by any special kind of materials or techniques.

With all this evolution, there is probably only one area that remained constant in sculpture, and it endures as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a part of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of art in 3-D.

Sculpture can be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached object in its own right, with a similar independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A relief does not exist in this independance. It is part of and projects from or is an innate part of some object that can serve either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not have the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as a painting might. However, sculpture does have a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that simply cannot be found in the pictorial arts. Sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual sense. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate some sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as firstly an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural art can be found in the pleasure that one experiences in fondling things.

All 3D forms are seen as having an expressive character along with their 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, sculptors are able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. This imagery may go beyond the simplistic presentation of fact and evoke a near endless range of subtle and powerful reactions.

The aesthetic raw material for this art is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-dimensional form. A sculpture may draw upon what we see exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been utilised to express a vast range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of 3D form, know something of its structural and expressive properties and possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellect and reaction, also known as a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art primarily appeals.

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