Break - Composing Time in Sculpture

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How might a break-an interruption, or absence-become a compositional method within sculptural practice? My practice-led research project asks how sculpture might insert breaks into spatial environments and time. Through writing, sculptures, and installations, I explore and articulate the potential of this modest but unruly temporality. My interdisciplinary area of research includes the philosophy of time, sociological studies of the impact of labor conditions on time, and art history and theory. My project is titled Break-Composing Time in Sculpture and takes the paradigmatic form of the break as its starting point. The break is understood both in its literal meaning, as in a work break, as well as in its metaphorical meanings in relation to the philosophy of temporality and space. As this is a practice-led project, the literature referenced is interdisciplinary drawing significant connections across different fields of knowledge. Three research questions structure my project and its potential impacts: 1. How can a sculptural practice experiment with rhythm, repetition, and attention as critical methods for production and presentation? How can material processes bring about a generous, textured, or resistant experience of time? Focusing on time opens new insights about the critical significance of sculpture. For instance, how does sculpture fulfill a public function and in what or whose time? How do public manifestations of sculpture, such as monuments, advocate for a particular time-extended, unchanged, or memorialized? My research generates modes of making sculpture that offer different propositions of time. 2. What insights can different rules and customs around historic and current cultures of breaks offer about the changing conditions of labor, leisure, and experiences of time? The written thesis will build on case studies and theoretical and historical research that address the paradigm of the break, while formally reflecting sculptural techniques. Whereas we can find more resolved markers about the character and political conditions of historic examples of the break our contemporary understanding of the break or free time is in flux. My research advances conceptions, values, and uses of time in the current moment.3. How might a material research practice of breaks-through interruption, duration, and anticipation- critically alter conceptions of space, void, or emptiness? My project is informed by philosophical investigations that meet absence, or nothingness, anew. I will pay particular attention to how conceptions of absence can be ideologically charged and their influence on histories of colonialism and expansion. My research demonstrates how sculptural production can alter these understandings and make contributions to how we view, treat, and shape notions of absence and space.Beginning with historical, sociological, and philosophical theories of time and its relation to power, my project unfolds through artistic practice-led material research as well as a theoretical written component. I develop a methodology that traces and records my artistic process of material sculptural production through an iterative process of molding, casting, and spatial installation. The written component formally articulates this material process of repetition and transformation while examining the historic and theoretical paradigms of the break, pause, or caesura. In the current context of the increasing casualisation of labour and competition for attention, the break appears as yet another moment for optimised productivity. Can the time of a break be recuperated through use, deferral, or relinquishment? This project traces how a sculptural practice can engage with imposed rhythms and multiple temporalities to make space for different processes of becoming.