“I think the relationship of a warm-blooded creature versus an object that is still and silent—which is essentially what I think sculpture is—for me is the sort of fundamentals. Sculpture is in our everyday lives the whole time. Crossing the road with a lorry coming towards you is, in my opinion, a sculptural experience, where you as a flesh-and-blood object [are] up against the thing that isn’t. And one’s emotional and psychological assessment of that all happens in a flash.

To me, there is a big, sculptural presence there because of the way that large lorry is constantly displacing space as it comes towards you—so the track that is left behind, which is now empty, was once filled. And that’s what I think we do when we’re interacting with sculpture: the space is filled. As we walk around it, we are constantly losing an image of it and finding a new image. So quite a large part of what sculpture is, [is] not necessarily visual. And I think that’s quite shocking. [It’s] a state of affairs that we’re assessing.”

💬 Phyllida Barlow

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