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    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Visual Art Practice on 20 Nov 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14702029.2020.1844945

    Accepted author manuscript, 289 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Makers' voices: four themes for material literacy in contemporary sculpture

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>20/11/2020
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Visual Art Practice
Issue number4
Volume19
Number of pages22
Pages (from-to)351-372
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Material has come to be acknowledged as an important source of political and social meaning due to recent philosophical debates concerning “material agency” (Gell 1998; Latour 2005; Coole and Frost 2010; Bennett 2010; Behar 2016). 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 Krauss (1979) and Lippard (1997; Lippard and Chandler 2015) 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 (Tucker 1981). Four themes have been developed from the analysis of qualitative interviews carried out with eight emerging UK sculptors in order to work towards “material literacy” (Lehmann 2016) in contemporary art practice.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Visual Art Practice on 20 Nov 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14702029.2020.1844945