Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making

The conference paper 'Skins, Shells, Snails' builds on the fabrication and exhibition of Soft Shell (2023), a site-specific sculpture by Sharples that contributes to their practice-led research into necro-ecologies and architectures. Featuring a series of casts lifted from medico-religious facilities – a section of a gutterway and a twin sink in a deconsecrated chapel and mortuary – the work explored how sculptural processes can make visible the negative space of non-present bodies and sites associated with care, death, and transience. Presented as part of Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, Sharples’ paper addressed the panel: The Matter of Materials with reference to New Materialism. Calling on the work of Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, and Astrida Neimanis et al, Sharples proposed a dialect of making – secretion, pooling, curing, heft – to unbalance the assertion of materials as inert, instead foregrounding their energetic, agential, and porous potentialities. In this paper, Sharples articulated how materials such as silicone and latex – commonly used in forensic and medical procedures – can function as epistemological tools, signalling concepts of permanence and preservation. These substances, with their ability to suspend and record surface indentations, extend the premise of representation toward material translation. By articulating a trans-corporeal ontology, Sharples considered how sculpture – and Soft Shell in particular – may attend to posthumanist concerns, where the entanglement of (non)human bodies unbalances understandings of authorship, autonomy, and form. The paper also referenced the work of Heidi Bucher and outlined casting procedures to position abstract sculpture as a site of ontological folding – where inside and outside, presence and absence are recognised as inseparable and ‘infra-thin’ (Duchamp). Casting, in this context, is positioned as a speculative method – attuned to spatial-temporal thresholds – through which sculpture becomes a way of registering the conditions of transience.

Convened by Dr. Charlotte Cullen, this symposium asserted the contemporary relevance of abstract sculpture made by women and trans artists. In refusing historical practices, which have denied women artists space, the positioning of community building is integral to the ongoing feminist repositioning of abstract sculpture. Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, in collaboration with the artist group TSM, supported a national and intergenerational dialogue of abstract sculptors working across the UK today, and held space for ongoing discussion.

Convenor: Dr. Charlotte Cullen.
Keynote Speaker: Prof Griselda Pollock

Panel 1: The Matter of Materials
Dr. Victoria Sharples, Becky Gee, Katrina Cowling, Alexandra Harley

Supported by York St John University and the Henry Moore Foundation