Sculpture

Sculpture in Three-dimensional Design arrives with a client attached. The specification is unusually direct about it: the work is designed to meet a specific purpose or for an intended space or site. So there is a brief, there is a place with a compass direction and a set of sight lines, and there are people who did not choose to encounter the piece and will walk past it every day for twenty years. That is a design problem, and it is answered with design methods.

This note treats sculpture the way the rest of this endorsement treats a building or a product: read the site, write the brief, work through maquettes, choose a material that will survive the weather and the public, engineer the thing so it stands up, and present it with drawings, models and a proper account of how it is fixed to the ground. Nothing here is about self-expression for its own sake. Expressive, open-ended sculpture is Fine Art's territory and a fine thing to do; it is simply not what this area of study is assessing.