This fascinating volume showcases the work of British artist, poet and performer Liz Finch and presents a series of 25 sculptures created between 1975 and 2016. The gentle figures are strangely familiar, built using found and made objects that might otherwise be discarded. Knitted limbs and faces with stitched or collaged features are affixed to torsos made from cardboard boxes that are plastered with papier-mâché and painted. The fragile bodies are then suspended on pieces of frayed string and twisted wire from the shoulders or sometimes by the neck. Finch subverts the ordinary and engages with the uncanny; a strange and anxious feeling created by familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts. Featuring full reproductions of each artwork alongside close details that reveal their composition, the book is threaded with poetic texts by Finch that blur the lines between personal memories, surreal dreams and everyday reality.

Space is a formative factor in the production of sculpture. Phenomenological thought interprets sculptural work in relation to the immersive experience of the viewer, situating it within its environment. But what possibilities lie beyond this unitary position? What is the political potential of a sculptural object? How can its spatial relations and movements be reconfigured beyond its immediate environment? Spatial Politics of the Sculptural investigates the concept of space and its role in the production of the sculptural form from a multidimensional perspective. Engaging with the work of Krauss, Fried, Merleau-Pony, Deleuze and Guattari, and using case studies of urban development in Paris, New York and Seoul it reinterprets and dislocates the sculptural form in terms of the political dynamism of space proposing a new methodology for reading, producing and expanding sculptural practice. Drawing on David Harvey's theory of capital, it scrutinizes the idea of the spatial in the process of urbanization. It examines the interrelationship between capital flow and accumulation, and explores the production and destruction of space in relation to the creation of three-dimensional works of art. In doing so, it expands the idea of the sculptural object in relation to the urban environment.

Come aboard with carver Mike Shipley as he shows you how to carve a sea-worthy old sailor and his crew. More than 100 step-by-step photos guide you in carving, painting and staining the salty Old Sea Captain and his first and second mates. Patterns are also included for making buoys, lobster traps and wooden crates to set an entire sea-faring scene. Includes step-by-step carving & painting demonstrations, patterns, and colour photos of the finished crew.

The Sketchbook of Loish offers readers a unique look into Loish's creative processes and idea generation, providing an insight into the role her sketches play in her extremely popular work. Peek inside Loish's sketchbook and discover how she explores gesture, stylization, and sketching for animation. Learn the different techniques she uses when sketching with traditional and digital tools, and follow the book's two detailed tutorials on character construction and sketching digitally to improve your own processes. The book also features handy quick tips for capturing movement, using different line weights, shading, and using textured brushes. Including an insight into Loish's character sketching, development sketches, landscape, and reference studies this book will show you how Loish captures the spirit of her finished artworks in her exquisite preliminary work. In addition to showcasing a comprehensive collection of Loish's sketches, this book features exclusive artwork, and a special chapter exploring Loish's personal concepts to give an in-depth look at how her initial ideas evolve through sketches to culminate in her accomplished concept designs. A truly inspiring and informative book with a high-quality finish and slipcase, The Sketchbook of Loish will have you itching to get sketching!

This richly illustrated and beautifully produced scholarly catalogue of the superlative collection of Renaissance and Baroque bronze figurative statuettes from the Hill collection accompanies an exhibition of the collection at the Frick Collection, New York, opening late January 2014. Spanning from 1470 to 1740, the bronzes presented are of exceptional quality and exemplify the development of bronze statuettes from 1470 in Renaissance Italy to their dissemination across the artistic centres of Europe. The Hill Collection is distinguished by rare, autograph masterpieces by Italian sculptors such as Andrea Riccio and Giambologna, and has the most important collection of Baroque Bronzes by Giuseppe Piamontini in the world. Its holding of works by the Giambologna school is the strongest found in any single collection, with the sole exception of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. These evoke the splendour of the late Renaissance courts, while the richness of the international BAroque is represented by religious themes by Alessandro Algardi, northern bronzes by Adriaen de Vries and Hubert Gerhard, and a remarkable assemblage of French 16th- and early 17th-century bronzes in the classical mode by Barthélemny Prieur and from the circle of Ponce Jacquiot. The Hill Collection reveals the range of artistry, invention and technical refinement characteristic of sculptures created when the tradition of the European statuette was at its height. The catalogue includes detailed biographies of each of the artists represented, and is introduced with essays by the distinguished authors. Patricia Wengraf is one of the world's leading dealers in bronzes, scuplture and works of art, and in her particular speciality, bronzes of the 15th-18th centuries, her knowledge and connoisseurship are of world repute. Denise Allen is Curator of Renaissance Paintings and Sculpture at the Frick Collection. Claudia Kryza-Gersch, formerly at the Kunstkammer, Vienna, is an independent scholar renowned for her studies of North Italian bronzes of the 16th and 17th centuries. Dimitrios Zikos, in Florence, an independent scholar renowned for his knowledge of the Florentine archives from c. 1550 to 1740, has curate many exhibitions at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Rupert Harris is the leading conservator of metalwork and sculpture in the UK.

The first biography of Anne Damer since 1908, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist, by Jonathan Gross, draws on Damer s notebooks and previously unpublished letters to explore the life and legacy of England s first significant female sculptor. Best known for her portraits of dogs and other animals, Damer also created busts of England s most important political heroes, sometimes within days or hours of their historical accomplishments. This in-depth biography traces her life during the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Peace of Amiens and the Hundred Days. Damer was convinced that art could have significant political influence, sending her bust of Nelson to the King of Tanjore to encourage trade with India. Her art stands at the transition between neoclassicism and romanticism and provides a wealth of insight into 19th century British sculpture. In the last twenty years, there has been a strong revival of interest in Damer s life, particularly in gay and lesbian studies due to her famous relationship with author Mary Berry. This text serves as a deeper investigation of this fascinating and important figure of British art history. The emotional menage a trois of Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Horace Walpole forms the heart of this new biography. Gross contends that all three individuals, had they led more conventional lives, would never have given the world the literary and artistic gifts they bestowed in the form of Strawberry Hill, Belmour, and Fashionable Friends. The struggles they faced will encourage modern readers to appreciate anew the fluidity of sexual identity and passionate friendship, as well as the restraints put in place by society to control them. Anne Damer s life has much to teach a new generation concerned with the complex relationship between love, art, and politics. The Life of Anne Damer will interest historians of Georgian England, and readers in the fine arts, literature, and history.

Gardens provoke thought and engagement in ways that are often overlooked. This book shines new light on long-held assumptions about gardens and proposes novel ways in which we might reconsider them. The author challenges traditional views of how we experience gardens, how we might think of gardens as works of art, and how the everyday materials of gardens - plants, light, water, earth - may become artful. The author provides a detailed analysis of Tupare, a garden in New Zealand, and uses it as source material for his analysis of the philosophical issues art gardens raise. His new account of gardens highlights the polymodal, multi-sensual, and improvisatory character of the garden experience, it offers an ontological comparison between gardens and humans and other animals, and it explains how identical plants, and arrangements of plants, may be mundane when encountered beyond the garden but artful, meaningful, and aesthetically valuable when experienced within it.

Carving is an area of woodworking that has wide appeal and can start as simply as whittling figures with a pocket knife. Since the cost of entry is so low, many people are willing to give it a try. But some people are put off by the conflicting information about what tools to buy, how to sharpen them, and by the bewildering range of carving styles. This book, with its common-sense approach to tools and sharpening, and its broad survey of the many styles is the perfect introduction for the novice carver. The projects will help the beginner become familiar with the tools and learn skills while trying a variety of carving styles to see which suits him best. The projects range from the traditional to the contemporary and reflect the tastes of today's woodcarvers.

Indian art, increasingly popular in the west, cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of the religious and philosophical background. This book, first published in 1985, covers all aspects of Hindu iconography, and explains that its roots lie far back in the style of prehistoric art. The dictionary demonstrates the rich profusion of cults, divinities, symbols, sects and philosophical views encompassed by the Hindu religious tradition.

Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside takes a journey through the artist's key experiments in visual art presenting works never seen before, commissioning new critical thinking, and amplifying knowledge of an artist whose ideas are fundamental to how we define art today. Over the course of fifty years, Nancy Holt's rich output spanned concrete poetry, audio, film and video, photography, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, and public sculpture. Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside details her unique and significant contributions, situating an important female voice within the narratives of land art and conceptual art. Initiating her art practice in 1966 with concrete poetry, she soon expanded her ideas into other media and the landscape. Through each of the mediums she worked in, Holt explored how we understand our place in the world by investigating perception and site within and outside of traditional museum contexts. In the mid-1970s Holt completed her most influential earthwork, Sun Tunnels, an artwork central to the definition of land art. Rigorous documentation of Holt's work, as well as contributions by key scholars, previously unseen photoworks and drawings, and a revealing, never-before-published "self-interview" by the artist bring her work into far fuller context. Developed in close consultation with Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed organization dedicated to preserving and extending the work of Nancy Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, this expansive publication will serve as a major contribution to the critical ongoing research into the art of our time. This new book is published to coincide with an exhibition anchored at Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden, and traveling to MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and further internationally.

A multidisciplinary overview of current research into the enduringly fascinating martial artefact which is the sword. The sword is the most iconic of all weapons. Throughout history, it has connected various, sometimes conflicting, dimensions of human culture: physical combat and representation of political power, definition of gender roles and refinement of body techniques, evolution of craftsmanship and mythological symbolism. The articles collected here explore these dimensions, from a variety of disciplines, among them archaeology, medieval history, museum conservation, and linguistics. They cover topics from the production and combat use of Bronze Age swords via medieval fencing culture to the employment of the sword in modern military. They question traditional sword typologies and wide-spread theories about sword making, discuss medieval sword terminology and the use of swords as royal insignia, and describe the scientific methods for approaching original finds. Arising from an international conference held at Deutsches Klingenmuseum Solingen (the German Blade Museum), the volume provides fresh insights into the forms the sword can take, and the thoughts it inspires. LISA DEUTSCHER and MIRJAM E. KAISER work in prehistoric archaeology, specialising in La Tène and Bronze Age swords, respectively. SIXT WETZLER is the deputy director of the German Blade Museum; his research focuses on the history of edged weapons, and their use. Contributors:Matthias Johannes Bauer, Holger Becker, Jan-Heinrich Bunnefeld, Rachel J. Crellin, Vincenzo D'Ercole, Andrea Dolfini, Raphael Hermann, Daniel Jaquet, Robert W. Jones, Ulrich Lehmann, Claus Lipka, Stefan Maeder, Michael Mattner, Florian Messner, Nicole Mölk, Ingo Petri, Stefan Roth, Fabrizio Savi, Ulrike Töchterle, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis, Marion Uckelmann, Henry Yallop

LAND ART: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO LANDSCAPE, ENVIRONMENTAL, EARTHWORKS, NATURE, SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION ART

A fully illustrated guide to land and environmental art. A newly updated and revised edition of our best-selling book.

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

This book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site Hans Haacke's Conceptual art Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, Robert Morris's environments Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments Hamish Fulton's walks and words Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles Richard Long and his art of walking Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Includes new illustrations, bibliography, notes. 380 pages. ISBN 9781861714008. www.crmoon.com

This book offers an essential reference for anyone interested in contemporary European jewellery design. Through guided conversations with the major designers of today, Roberta Bernabei reveals the creative, conceptual and technical working practices that underpin the aesthetic of each practitioner's work. In addition, the dialogues shed new light on these jewellers' inspiration and their ideas about functionality and the human body. Each interview is supported by photographs and a detailed bibliography and appendix which locates the jewellers' work in galleries, museums as well as online. Major jewellery artists present include: Giampaolo Babetto, Gijs Bakker, Otto Kunzli, Ruudt Peters, Mario Pinton and Tone Vigeland, alongside members of the emergent generation: Ted Noten, Annamaria Zanella and Christoph Zellweger. This book, which opens the door to contemporary jewellery practice, will be welcomed by all students, lecturers and practitioners.

Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian emigre formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles-including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine-to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani's plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice-making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain-is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani's sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.