Losing Touch: Moulding Meaning in Contemporary Sculpture

Description

The paper Losing Touch: Moulding Meaning in Contemporary Sculpture was presented in the panel Moulds as Cultural & Material Mediators (chaired by Hannah Kinney & Emily Knight, University of Oxford) at the CAA2018 conference, Los Angeles, USA.In this paper Hollinshead argued that casting has significant potential to contribute to wider contemporary debates, offering artists cultural shorthand to reference and a canon to fracture and challenge. Ideas of standardization and mutation – whether that be gender identity, genetic evolution, globalisation or many other topics – are ripe for exploration through casting, assuming artists choose to promote casting from ‘unseen’ technique to conceptually-resonant act. These discussions were centred on Hollinshead’s sculptures Doughboy and the Iliac Crest and Sanit Forma, which were discussed in relation to this exploration of casting, which addressed the potential impact of demonstrable technical skill (or its absence) on the reception of the work. The changing status of cast copies of classical sculpture, their influence on the teaching and practice of sculpture, and the direct use of the cast collections within contemporary sculpture – including Hollinshead’s – were also explored in the paper alongside the work of Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, Ron Mueck and Roberto Coughi.

Period	23 Feb 2018
Event title	CAA 2018: Moulds as Cultural & Material Mediators panel
Event type	Conference
Location	Los Angeles, United States, CaliforniaShow on map