This book investigates how British contemporary artists who work with clay have managed, in the space of a single generation, to take ceramics from niche-interest craft to the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This development has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by the kind of critical discussion usually reserved for the 'higher' discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. Laura Gray examines what this means for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to a specific material but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond clay.

Award-winning chocolate artist Patrick Roger (Meilleur Ouvrier de France chocolatier 2000) has pursued a parallel body of longer-lasting work, creating sculptures in a variety of materials, including bronze, aluminium, silicone, marble, and concrete. He begins with chocolate as a base, working this malleable material quickly with techniques he has perfected over many years, before casting it. This book, the second volume of his sculpted works (Volume 1 was published in 2018), features 177 new creations that are described in detail and beautifully photographed. Further insight into Roger’s work is found in a notebook of contemporary inspirations and a reproduction of his personal sketchbook. Text in French.

Influenced by Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona, and the mannerist park of Bomarzo, Niki de Saint Phalle decided that she wanted to make something similar; a monumental sculpture park created by a woman. In 1974, she was donated some land in Garavicchio, Tuscany, about 100 km north-west of Rome along the coast. The garden, on which planning started in 1978, contains sculptures of the symbols found on Tarot cards. It opened in 1998, after more than 20 years of work. The garden was still incomplete when Niki de Saint Phalle died. With elaborate illustrations and sensitively written texts this book presents in detail the formation of the garden and the underlying ideas.

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.

The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artist Adrian Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

If mediatization has surprisingly revealed the secret life of inert matter and the 'face of things', the flipside of this has been the petrification of living organisms, an invasion of stone bodies in a state of suspended animation. Within a contemporary imaginary pervaded by new forms of animism, the paradigm of death looms large in many areas of artistic experimentation, pushing the modern body towards mineral modes of being which revive ancient myths of flesh-made-stone and the issue of the monument. Scholars in media, visual culture and the arts propose studies of bodies of stone, from actors simulating statues to the transmutation of the filmic body into a fossil; from the real treatment of the cadaver as a mineral living object to the rediscovery of materials such as wax; from the quest for a 'thermal' equivalence between stone and flesh to the transformation of the biomedical body into a living monument.

Dialectical Materialism: Aspects of British Sculpture Since the 1960s charts a network of relations linking the work of six sculptors: Anthony Caro, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, William Turnbull, Rachel Whiteread and Alison Wilding. Since the 1960s, successive artists and art-critical frameworks have sought to undermine or dispense with traditional media and the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the core disciplines of modern Western art. The artists studied here are united by their commitment to sculpture as a distinct practice, but also to broadening, challenging and redefining the basis of that practice. In his essay, art historian Jonathan Vernon argues that each of these sculptors has engaged in a realignment of sculptural and material space - in removing sculpture from the disembodied, 'disinterested' spaces of mid-century modernism and returning it to a shared world inhabited by other objects, ourselves and our material interests. From the conflicts that inhere in this space, we may discern the outlines of a new idea of British sculpture since the 1960s - an idea by turns narrative, dramatic and dysfunctional.

First opened in 1873, the Victoria and Albert Museum's Cast Courts were purpose built to house copies of architecture and sculpture from around the world. They contain some of the Museum's largest objects, including casts of Trajan's Column (shown in two halves) and the twelfth century Portico de la Gloria from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. Among the Museum's most popular galleries, the Cast Courts are an extraordinary expression of Victorian taste, ambition and public spirit. Published to celebrate the opening of the refurbished Cast Courts at the V&A, this book presents a fresh perspective on the Museum's diverse collection of reproductions including plaster casts, electrotypes and photographs.

Hanneke Beaumont is known for her life-size sculptures of human figures in public spaces, which are to be found everywhere - from Brussels to Connecticut. For 35 years, she has been a key part of the international art scene with works in the collections of, among others, the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, the Baker Museum in Florida and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Michigan. The latter two also organised a highly-successful solo exposition of her work.

This impressive work of scholarship brings together anthropology, religion, popular culture, and history in its focus on Bakhtiari lion tombstones that have remained largely unknown and hence little studied. Although lions have long figured in Iranian history, art and myth as symbols of rulership, power, religious leadership or as steadfast guardians, art historians have tended to concentrate their attentions on court traditions and the role of lions in popular culture, especially in religion, has remained little considered until this book. Funerary stone lions are to be found throughout western Iran, but are concentrated in the summer and winter pasture areas of the Bakhtiari, today's provinces of Chahar Mahal and Bakhtiari, west of Isfahan, and Khuzistan. This highly illustrated colour volume draws on meticulous fieldwork and includes over three hundred photographs, drawings, charts and maps. The recording of this rare sculptural heritage, dating from the 16th century to the early 20th century, has become ever more pressing as some tombstones have been taken from their original settings and re-erected in parks, others damaged by the elements and some recently broken up to be used in road repairs. 'Pedram Khosronejad's Lion Tombstones among Bakhtiari Pastoral Nomads in South West Iran is to be greatly welcomed... [It is ]based on extensive fieldwork and represents something of a rescue project....This volume, however, goes further in raising three inter-related issues: why have these important artifacts been neglected even by specialists; how do they relate to a richer understanding of Iranian art and culture; and how does vernacular art relate to the accepted traditions of Iranian art?.... This volume will prove to be important in bringing the lion tombstones to a larger public attention.' G. R. Garthwaite, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies, Emeritus & Professor of History, Emeritus

Don Gummer's career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminium, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks have evolved into subtly inventive, often monumental, freestanding sculptures that demonstrate his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail. This new monograph is the first survey on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work. Gummer has described his interest in sculpture as "the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing." Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist makes durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space is an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature's creations would be. The artist's works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Chase Manhattan. He has received awards from prestigious organisations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Pioneering investigation of the popular "double tomb" effigies in the Middle Ages. 2022 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600 2021 International Center of Medieval Art Annual Book Prize Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their "stone fidelity". This first full account of the "double tomb" places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the "double tomb" as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love. Published with the generous financial assistance of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Latinx artist Tamara Kostianovsky began using her discarded clothes as artistic material shortly after immigrating to the United States, addressing cultural and physical displacement, assimilation and identity, and the brutal history of Latin America. Today, these emotionally charged materials coalesce in a post-colonial vision for an ecological future. Tamara Kostianovsky creates sculptures from textiles that address the relationship between landscapes, the body, and violence. This volume highlights distinct bodies of her work including sculptures of butchered carcasses, slayed birds, and severed trees. Built with layers of texture, colour, and emotion, these works dive head-first into the tension between beauty and horror, confronting histories of systemic violence and transforming them into utopian environments.

The Serpent Column, a bronze sculpture that has stood in Delphi and Constantinople, today Istanbul, is a Greek representation of the Near Eastern primordial combat myth: it is Typhon, a dragon defeated by Zeus, and also Python slain by Apollo. The column was created after the Battle of Plataia (479BC), where the sky was dominated by serpentine constellations and by the spiralling tails of the Milky Way. It was erected as a votive for Apollo and as a monument to the victory of the united Greek poleis over the Persians. It is as a victory monument that the column was transplanted to Constantinople and erected in the hippodrome. The column remained a monument to cosmic victory through centuries, but also took on other meanings. Through the Byzantine centuries these interpretation were fundamentally Christian, drawing upon serpentine imagery in Scripture, patristic and homiletic writings. When Byzantines saw the monument they reflected upon this multivalent serpentine symbolism, but also the fact that it was a bronze column. For these observers, it evoked the Temple's brazen pillars, Moses' brazen serpent, the serpentine tempter of Genesis (Satan), and the beast of Revelation. The column was inserted into Christian sacred history, symbolizing creation and the end times. The most enduring interpretation of the column, which is unrelated to religion, and therefore survived the Ottoman capture of the city, is as a talisman against snakes and snake-bites. It is this tale that was told by travellers to Constantinople throughout the Middle Ages, and it is this story that is told to tourists today who visit Istanbul. In this book, Paul Stephenson twists together multiple strands to relate the cultural biography of a unique monument.

Winner of the Holyer an Gof Award 2022 (Leisure and Lifestyle) An illustrated guide to one hundred of the finest early Cornish stone crosses, dating from around AD 900 to 1300. These characteristic features of the Cornish landscape are splendid examples of their type, exhibiting a wide geographical spread and a certain weather-beaten beauty. The medieval stone crosses of Cornwall have long been objects of curiosity both for residents and visitors. This is the first ever accessible volume on the subject, combining detailed description and discussion of the crosses with information on access, colour images and suggestions for further reading. An approachable but academically rigorous work, it includes analysis of the decorative designs and sculptural techniques, accompanied by high-quality photographs which illustrate the subtleties of each cross, often hard to discern in situ. Ancient and High Crosses of Cornwall offers an ideal introduction for the general reader but will also prove essential to local historians, landscape historians, archaeologists and anyone working in the area of Cornish studies or connected with the Cornish diaspora. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/NKIP4746