Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into 3D art objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can range from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. A huge variety of material are often 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 otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed branding that is applicable to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that grows and changes and continually extends the range of forms 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 before, and in the everchanging state of visual art at the turn of the 21st century, one simply cannot predict what its future extensions are going to become.

A few features which in previous centuries were thought to be essential to the sculpturing art but are not present in a big part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of the definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. At the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that figures of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-D works of art began to be created.

Before 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 forms — have usually been to some kind of extent an inextricable part of any design, but their role was unacknowledged. In a good deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus has shifted, and the spatial elements have started to become dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a commonly acceptable area of the art of sculpture.

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

Finally, sculpture since the 20th century was no longer restricted to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because modern sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve a purpose, sculpture can no longer be identified with any special kind of materials or techniques.

Throughout all these changes, there is probably just one thing that stayed constant in the art of sculpture, and it endures as the foremost abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a branch of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of art in 3D.

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

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot conjure the illusion of space from purely optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we might see in a painting. It does possess a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, argued by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as primarily an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural work can be based in the pleasure that one experiences in doing this.

All three-dimensional forms are seen as having an expressive character as well as purely geometric properties. They may come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and more. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, sculptors are able to create visual images in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. Such images go beyond the mere presentation of fact and impress a vast range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material used here is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3D form. A sculpture may draw upon what we see exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of simple invention. It has been mastered to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of 3D form, understand something of its structural and expressive aspects and will develop emotional responses to them. This combination of understanding and sensitive response, also known as a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art of sculpture primarily appeals.

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