Image: Beeswax Flutes, video still, 2018.
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Unimposing Form, essay book, Run Artist Run. Coming soon, early 2025.
Unimposing Form is an essay book that rethinks the relationship between form and matter in forming practices, including and exceeding sculpture. These essays explore the potential of the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray for rethinking forces of sculptural formation through an exploration of the practices of Barbara Hepworth and Lygia Clark. Irigaray’s conceptualisations of the interval, difference, relation, and affection enable a rethinking of tensions and conventions at play between notions of form and matter.
Hepworth and Clark’s practices each respectively allow for explorations of different tensions that emerge from a presumption that form is given to matter. The essays explore the ways that these artists respond to the impossibility of form being imposed from outside matter’s dynamism and memory. Form’s departure is only temporary, re-emerging through tensions reproduced in assumptions about forming practices and sculpture.
Published as an abridged version of PhD research, Unimposing Form offers practice-based tactics through which the repeatedly imposing quality implied by the habitual conceptualisation of form’s power over matter can be observed and dissolved in ways that resonate beyond art.