Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into 3D works. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. A massive variety of media may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials are carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed branding that is applicable to a permanently standing category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and changes and continually extends the range of its activities and evolving new styles of objects. The scope of the term was much wider in the later half of the 20th century than what it had been only two or three decades prior, and in the evolving state of the visual arts at the beginning of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future dimensions are going to be.

A few features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to sculpture but are not present in a large part of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen to be a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, that were most often human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the start of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that figures of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional artworks began to be common practice.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid forms — have always been to some kind of degree an inextricable part of its design, but their role was secondary. In a large area of modern sculpture, however, the attention has broadened, and the spatial roles have become dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a commonly accepted field of the art of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, excepting works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can any longer be regarded as fundamental to defining the art of sculpture.

Additionally, sculpture during the 20th century was not restricted to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because modern sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that they wish to, the definition of the art form can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.

After all this evolution, there is probably only one element that remains constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a field of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of art in three dimensions.

Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached object in its own right, possessing an independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this reality. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of something else that serves either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not conjure the illusion of space by simple optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as we see in a painting. Sculpture does possess a reality, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied to the pictorial arts. Different sculptures are tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual sense. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, argued by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as elementarily an art of touch and that the beginnings of sculptural art can be traced to the pleasure one feels in doing this.

All 3D forms are seen as possessing an expressive character as well as solely geometric properties. They may strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. This visual imagery will go beyond the pure presentation of fact and impress a near endless range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material used here is, so to speak, the complete realm of expressive three-D form. A sculpture may draw upon what we know exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of simple invention. It has been utilised to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and will have emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitive response, also known as a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that this art form primarily appeals.

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