Touch-Space: The Tactile Imagination in Contemporary Sculpture

Charlotte Cullen is a member of the YSI Sculpture Network and their work is currently on display at Leeds Art Gallery and 87 Gallery, Hull. Cullen was awarded their practice-led PhD from the Centre for Sculptural Thinking at the University of Huddersfield in 2019. Their practice resonates around forms of care through an embodied, socially-classed material politics which has been presented nationally and internationally, including with The Tetley, Leeds; Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; Patriothall Edinburgh; Yiyuan Tang Museum, Shanghai; Gloam, Sheffield; Croydon Arts, London; Leeds Central Library; Gallery 32, London; Embassy, Edinburgh; Sunny Bank Mills, Farsley; Jakwaa Arts Centre, Mombasa; Artcore, Derby; Abingdon Studios, Blackpool; Royal Pump Room, Harrogate; Pilot Press, London; Emergency Gallery, Switzerland; Vane, Newcastle; SOMA Contemporary Gallery, Cork; LimaZulu, London; Gallery Q, Copenhagen; The V&A, London. In 2021 Angus Reid wrote in The Morning Star that “[Cullen] greets the needs of the present without sentimentality and with clear eyes”. Cullen curates Vessel gallery with Dr Nathan Walker within York St John university campus, York, where they Lecture in Fine Art. Previously, Cullen was panel member of the PANIC! Network, convened by Prof. Griselda Pollock and The Tetley, Leeds, a committee member at serf, Leeds, and curator of UNNAWAY, Huddersfield.

This paper examines the patriarchal embedding of the politics of touch into women’s intersecting background conditions – including gender, social class, parental and marital status, age, disability – claiming that this strategy negatively affects women’s creativity by rendering their subjectivities patriarchally illegitimate and, as such, socially and culturally ‘untouchable’. In so doing, the paper builds from Hilary Robinson’s claim (2006) that women experience difficulties in developing syntaxes for mediating their subjectivities, and explores how unequally distributed social touch, and, by extension, interpersonal connectivity, reputational standing and belonging, prohibits women’s equal inclusion. This paper claims that normalised social processes including pathologisation and ostracism effectuate social touch deprivation, causing pain and trauma to women and flattening and fragmenting their bodily gazes. This obstructs their equal development as artists, engendering their marginalisation and exclusion as cultural producers whilst retaining them within spaces of (domestic) subjugation. The paper proposes that, when newly geophilosophically mapped, bodily works by women such as Luce Irigaray, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Hannah Wilke present tactile syntaxes which reconnect women to bodily touch as an activist force for newly configuring spaces of transformative becoming.

Linda Aloysius’ work is currently on display in the exhibition Poor Things at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (4 March – 21 May 2023). She has previously exhibited at The Foundling Museum (2022), Tate Modern (2020), Credit-Suisse (2019), Glasgow University (2019), Durham University (2018), CSM (2018) and MAAT, Lisbon (2017). She has published in Feminist Activisms and Artivisms (2020), Feminist Review (2019), Museological Review (2016) and Infallible, In Search of the Real George Eliot (2005). She lectures in Fine Art with Sphinx International, China and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she is also a Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Linda Aloysius was awarded her PhD by Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2018.

In this paper Locke will explore how the sculptural materials she uses in her practice both embody and transgress the social, environmental and gendered contexts from which they are drawn. Here, the domestic material of a saggy, ageing female swimsuit is contorted to transcend its fixity of class, race, gender and mortality, as shiny bioresin stiffens and slickens its contours. It is at once inviting and rejecting tactile interaction: its smoothness interrupted by objects of abjected labour: a prickly feather duster piercing the crotch, a child’s knobbly, knocked-around garden fork slicing through the arms. These elements of the piece’s social condition interrupt the desire to touch, with the hand’s familiarity with a less desirable, functional relationship to these tools. Moreover, is this female-denoted garment really personal – designed for only intimate, assumed white, hands to touch? Or has it already been touched by many brown hands, in factory production in the global south, exploited in labour themselves? Dried flowers spill from its womb, in a shrivelled, cross-species collusion to battle mortality, as pleasure is interrupted further by a signal of ecological demise, where species intersect as commercial production encroaches on wild terrain.

Lana Locke is a cross-disciplinary artist practising in installation, sculpture, video, drawing and painting. She has had solo exhibitions at LUNGLEY Gallery (2019, 2020 and 2023), Liddicoat & Goldhill project space (2018), DOLPH Projects, (2016). She has exhibited in group exhibitions at Hales Gallery (2022), National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan (2021), Kingston Museum (2019), MOCA Taipei, Taiwan (2018), the Nunnery Gallery (2018), Block 336 (2015) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013 and 2016). She is a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts.

lungleygallery.com/lana-locke

This paper will investigate the uncanny quality of domestic materials in sculpture, focusing on the work of the New York-based artist Brandon Ndife (b. 1991). Working with ready-made furniture, Ndife corrupts or corrodes the painted and lacquered surface of these familiar objects. In typical works, the inside of a cabinet or underside of a table is built up with resin and polyurethane foam to create a contrasting surface that appears charred, mouldy, or water-logged, often with mummified appendages that seem to be both growing and desiccating. Ndife’s work can be interpreted in relation to Freud’s concept of das Unheimliche: the uncanny, or literally translated the ‘unhomely.’ Echoing this quality of the familiar-unfamiliar, Ndife often retains a normal exterior plane of his found furnishings, such as the cabinet doors or table top, and renders another face or dimension grotesque, giving the furniture an undead quality that complicates touch-memories of the home. Centring on the domestic, this paper will explore the relationship between touch and repulsion in sculptural surface.

Sydney Smith is maternity cover Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Focusing on post-Cold War artists in the United States and Germany, Smith has previously worked in galleries in New York and Berlin. Her research centres on the social history of museums and (im)materiality in contemporary art.

In what ways can the sculptor knowingly own the touch-space during the act of making? How do they contrive this phenomenon? Is it an accident of material process? Is it simply talent or what we could call the innate sensibility of the maker? Terms ‘touch-space’ and ‘tactile imagination’ inhabit our readings and understandings of sculpture now, but these foundational insights were however formed outside of the practice of making sculpture as we looked at, scrutinised, analysed and gazed upon it.

This paper will offer insights into creating the ‘touch-space’ that are the result of research conducted from the perspective of the one who is doing it, the sculptor. Drawing on the idea of Artistic Research developed by Hannula, Suoranta and Vadén (2005) as a ‘context-aware and historical process that works ‘inside-in’, beginning and ending with acts committed within an artistic practice’ the manipulation of clay will be presented as a research method that combines material process with psychological and social behaviours. Sculpture that interprets personal family photographs will be used to demonstrate how the age-old practice of modelling can be considered in methodological terms as haptic tools for the tactile translation of memory and lived experience.

Sheila Gaffney is a sculptor with a long commitment to crafts and the material object. She is Professor of Research, Innovation & Development at Leeds Arts University where she previously held the role of Head of Fine Art. Her research encounters sculpture, life writing and psychoanalysis with particular interest in the relationships that exist between the traditional processes of modelling and casting with identity formation, class, gender, and multi-generational ethnicity. She has explored these themes through artefacts and exhibitions, published articles and conference contributions alongside her doctoral thesis Embodied Dreaming as a Sculptural Practice.

Alison Eardley, PhD, is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Westminster. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, her interdisciplinary work applies a cognitive lens to interpretation, visitor experience and audience engagement in museums and the cultural sector more broadly. She uses cognitive psychology to unpick visuocentric biases that privilege vision in museum experience. Her work has explored inclusive audio description, as a means of enhancing museum experience for all visitors. She is a co-investigator on the AHRC Sensational museum project, which aims to create museum experiences where no one sense is necessary or sufficient. She was a Fulbright-Smithsonian Scholar (2021-22).

How might a consideration of the engagement of sculpture by blind beholders help us to reassess the debate between Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the nature of sculpture as a medium? Wilder will argue that a developed haptic sensibility is not only (as Read suggests) the experience of surface, volume and mass, but one that brings our bodily and imaginative orientation into play. Our kinaesthetic engagement performs a locative function not only in relation to the work’s ‘outer’ reality but its virtual realm. Read fails to account for the distinction between ‘actual’ volume and what Susanne Langer refers to as ‘the semblance of kinetic volume’ – sculpture’s particular mode of virtual space – which brings into play the empty space surrounding a sculptural object. Langer refers to this as existing for vision alone, but a strong case can be made that for all beholders (and particular those with visual impairment) proprioception plays an important role. Such a consideration would shore up Read’s argument against Greenberg’s accusation that Read negates the radical incorporation of space into sculpture, while acknowledging the durational shift required when sculptural work is experienced primarily through touch.

Ken Wilder, as an artist, writer and academic, is the University of the Arts London Reader in Spatial Design. He is Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded network ‘Beyond the Visual: Non-Sighted Modes of Beholding Art’, working with the blind artist Aaron McPeake as Co-Investigator. The network is based on the premise that contemporary forms of art practice open up new ways of engaging blind and partially blind beholders. Wilder has published widely in aesthetics journals and is the author of Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception, published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

This paper navigates through corporeal examples from fingertips to the surface of skin, concluding with mass to explore why touch is essential to Barff’s practice. Barff uses examples of her work and processes, autobiographical and empirical examples from neuropsychology and studies of memory. She begins by making autobiographical, fingertip connections between teaching herself Braille, playing the piano and drawing. Her motivation to close what she perceived as the ‘gap in drawing’ led to a desire for direct contact with materials and surfaces; with references to Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind. In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor describes skin as a continual tactile surface, wrapping like a Möbius strip. Barff explore links between our physical edges, skin, clothing and autobiographical memory in relation to her casting process: she stitches clothing, fills the internal space with casting materials which finds all edges, textures and details. She then peels the fabric off revealing the solid cast. Her choice of materials and processes utilise volume, weight and gravity. She explores the embodiment of weight in sculpture, and in contrast the implied absence of weightlessness. Lastly, she discusses how her practice informed and raises questions about relationships between weight and memory.

Helen Barff is a London based sculptor. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in Fine Art and Art History in 1999 and Drawing MA, Camberwell College of Art in 2004. She has exhibited, been on residencies and run seminars in the UK and internationally. A sensitivity to touch is central to Barff’s processes: such as wrapping, casting or other interventions in space and surface. She is interested in how memory becomes embedded in matter, currently exploring autobiographical memories contained in belongings, particularly clothing. Collaborative research with neuropsychologist Professor Catherine Loveday has demonstrated the importance of clothing in maintaining identity for displaced people.

www.helenbarff.co.uk

Touch can be differentiated between something coming-into-contact with any aspect of our passive body, and something that we deliberately reach out for. As identified by Barad, ‘Is touching not by its very nature always already an invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within’ (2012). Whilst deliberate touch is more generally associated with our hands and our fingers, Foster questions how reaching-out towards artwork can be consciously seeking-out something sensate with our heads, limbs, torso. Within an intentionally prosthetic pedagogy touch is like flicking a switch to complete an electrical circuit potentially reaching to the matter of the art museum. A circuit enabled by touch that is tuned into a material experience held in the hand and felt in the body. With pedagogical art objects in our hands, new modes of critical engagement in the art museum become possible through a tangible experience of touch. If held, grasped, and gripped, the matter of these objects considered in proximity to exhibited sculptures can potentially interrupt habitual perception and extend haptic potential.

Kimberley Foster is an artist and lecturer in Arts, Education and Learning at Goldsmiths and is currently completing PhD research; (Material Acts of Thinking and Learning in the Art Museum. Embodied Encounters and the Pedagogical Art Object) with the research taking place at Tate Modern and the Sainsbury Centre. She has a collaborative practice as sorhed (www.sorhed.com) and works extensively with exhibitions and collections. This sculptural-object-based-practice focuses on the development and enactment of pedagogical art objects questioning interpretation, touch, and encounter. Foster has presented widely and co-authored journal papers/chapters on, object dialogues, drawing and writing in creative practice.

Contemporary neuroscience supports Herbert Read’s (1964) view that “It is a false simplification to base the various arts on any one sensation, for what actually takes place… is a chain reaction… in which one sensation … involves other sensations, either by memory association or by actual sensory motor connections’. This paper first outlines the brain mechanism of the said ‘chain reaction’ that constitutes visual perception, emphasising that it is an active two-way process of integration between cells conducting visual information and other sensory systems including tactile and spatial awareness, motor areas of the brain, and stored experiences. The principle of embodied simulation is also of particular relevance to sculpture. This enables us to perceive a work of art using the same brain cells that internally represent our own bodies, thus greatly enhancing and personalising its understanding – beyond what might be expected from viewing it only as an external inanimate object. The artist uses these sensori-motor perceptual processes repeatedly while creating a work, and the observer too can build upon their own inner version. The mechanisms described will be illustrated by discussion of two sets of randomly selected contemporary sculptures: ‘A walk to the RA’ and “Ten Royal Society Sculptures”.

Martin Elphick was educated at Alleyn’s School London and Oxford Universities. Qualifications: MB BS, MD, MRCPsych. His awards include: NHS Clinical Excellence Award and Bath Society of Artists’ Sculpture Prize. He has published around 35 medical papers, a collection of poetry (Sticks and Apples) and a sculpture exhibition book (Ambition and the Transitional Objects, 2021). Elphick has made sculptures and paintings since his early teens, alongside a career in psychiatry. A ‘second career’ sculptor since 2010, he has a workshop at home as well as memberships of sculpture groups.

This paper charts the course of ‘survivor steel’ from the ruins of the World Trade Center to over 2,000 memorials across the world. Of the 200,000 tons of steel recovered, 95% was quickly recycled, but what remained was sacralised, and distributed, to form local memorials. Unlike WWI cenotaphs, located in town centres, or large monuments in capitals, 9/11 steel ended up in small memorials in office parks and traffic circles – the edge spaces of 21st century suburban sprawl. Using newspaper reports, interviews, and materials obtained from a freedom of information request, this paper analyses how dispersed memorialisation honoured ‘first responders’ across America, enlarging the geography of trauma from Lower Manhattan to the nation; and how memorials made by local craftspeople brought back themes of spoliation, entropy, and fear from postwar sculpture. I connect the curation, gifting, and transportation of steel to a form of mourning with military antecedents as well as a deliberate focus on strength and martial masculinity in the years immediately after the attack. Finally, this paper focuses on the civic importance of ‘laying hands’ on survivor steel, showing that even in our digital age, the demands of memory remain stubbornly tactile.

Samuel Holleran is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne, where he is examining memorialisation, land tenure, and the reimagination of cemeteries with the DeathTech Research Group. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work focuses on the power and politics imbued in urban design and landscape architecture. He has worked as a researcher and educator in the field of civically-engaged design and art with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in New York City and the Chair for Architecture & Urban Design at ETH-Zürich.

Kavanagh’s paper sets out to examine the relationship between human touch to haptic images, architectural surface and screens; the connection between cinematic space and gallery space as places of viewing objects; and how his practice might exist within, and contribute towards, a historical response to surfaces at a time of evolution in this field.

Laurence Kavanagh has held residencies at the British School at Rome (2007) and IMMA (2009) which have enabled him to work in a way that brought together a response to location, event and his own hand within the process of the work. Since then, he has developed a career through a self-sustained studio practice and a number of residencies, awards and prizes including Henry Moore Foundation grant; Elephant Trust grant; A N Newsletter; Arts Council England curatorial grant (2004, 2006); V&A Museum residency; Scottish Sculpture Workshop residency, Cocheme Fellowship (University of the Arts London) and winner of both the Claremorris and Oriel Mostyn. Kavanagh is currently a Henry Moore Institute fellow and will be attending a residency at CCA Andratx, Spain (2023). His artwork is in the Arts Council Collection and was included in the exhibition Transmitter/Receiver the Persistence of Collage, Hayward Touring Exhibition, 2011. From 2012 until its closure in 2016, Kavanagh benefitted from representation by Andrew Renton, Marlborough Contemporary. He has exhibited with HE:RO gallery Amsterdam and is currently exhibiting at Parafin Gallery, London in a group show The Secret of Lightness. In 2014/15 he received a fellowship at Baltic 39 (Baltic Gallery), Newcastle – the first time in his career he had obtained year-long support – financial, technical and theoretical. The direct positive impact of this opportunity made 2014/15/mid 2016 the most immersive and productive period of his career so far, with two major bodies of work October and March having been realised. Solo shows include: Gallery North, Newcastle; Star and Shadow, a Catalyst Arts Commission for the Hatton gallery, Newcastle; Marlborough Contemporary in 2012 and 2015, London; culminating in a major public solo exhibition at the prestigious Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno in 2016.

In this paper, Rudd will consider the significance of Phyllida Barlow’s 1976 sculptural installation, Shedmesh through the lens of Herbert Read’s endorsement of a ponderable, tactile sculpture. She will investigate Shedmesh in detail, comparing the work with a range of sculptures produced by Barlow’s forebears and contemporaries, including Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Tony Smith and Tony Cragg. In doing so, she will frame Shedmesh as a fundamentally tactile object, one which embraces various ‘hands on’ approaches to making, but also pushes up against the legacies of minimalism and post-minimalism in order to establish new sculptural opportunities which hold relevance today. Although the original Shedmesh no longer exists, Rudd will make specific reference to a photograph of the work installed at Camden Arts Centre. This image of Barlow, her young daughter and her artwork reveals a complex set of tensions involving parenting and multitasking, childcare and studio work, gender and sculpture. Rudd will propose that Shedmesh not only establishes tangible connections with the sculptural past, present and future, but also interweaves the textures and sensations of the domestic realm. With this expanded perspective in view, she hopes to invigorate and complicate Herbert Read’s assertions, stretching his vision of tactility to make room for new perspectives, approaches, and sculptural positions.

Natalie Rudd is a curator, writer and PhD researcher (University of Birmingham). Her research, Lost and Found: Material Precarity in British Sculpture by Women, 1978-1993 is funded by Midlands4Cities. In her former role as Senior Curator of the Arts Council Collection, Rudd managed the Collection’s centre for sculpture at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2003-21) and curated many national touring exhibitions, including Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945. Rudd has written widely on art and on artists including Peter Blake, Tess Jaray, Paul de Monchaux and Veronica Ryan. Her recent books, The Self-Portrait (2021) and Contemporary Art (2023), are published by Thames & Hudson.

What has the intimate, tactile, and sensory material language of woven textiles recorded of our bodies, sex, fear, imagination, hope, desire, trauma? Exploring notions of material capacity, embodied archives, and haptic imagination, this paper poses questions around what impact touch and tactility have on our ways of experiencing and as means of divulging social narratives. Written as a brief feminist revision on touch, Symonds questions what physical and metaphorical agencies are activated by our haptic engagements with everyday fabric. Through an expanded material lens, this research looks to the ubiquity and familiarity of what surrounds us to begin critically assessing connections between memory, materiality, tactility and desire.

Mia Mai Symonds is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and workshop facilitator working primarily across weaving, writing, installation and sculpture. Through a critically, socially and materially engaged approach to research of woven textiles, Mia is dedicated to uncovering this everyday material’s emotional potency and capacity to trace human experiences across time and place. With feminist theory at the heart of her research, Mia’s work is formed around notions of memory, sensory experiences, archived information, knowledge exchange and identity. Her site-specific installations and designed workshops are often offered as a space for re-imagining; for considering the depth of our relationships with cloth and the ontological effects of our engagements with it.

Michael Paraskos was born in Leeds and is an art historian with thirty years teaching experience universities and art schools around the world. In 1992 he was the research assistant on the landmark exhibition Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art which helped to re-evaluate Herbert Read’s position in global art history, and he went on to write his PhD on Read, at the University of Nottingham, in 2005. He was also the organiser of the 2004 Herbert Read Conference at Tate Britain, and edited the book that came out of this, Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, published by the Freedom Press in 2008. He has also published on other aspects of historical and contemporary art and culture, including writing for The Guardian newspaper, The Spectator magazine and numerous academic journals, as well as a brief stint on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme.