Active Archives: Archival Interventions in Sculpture

In April 2014 I organised and chaired a panel entitled ‘Archival Interventions in Sculpture’ for the annual Association of Art Historians conference at the Royal College of Art. The presentation brought together papers from art historians, archivists, curators and sculptors to forge new insights into the role of the archive in sculptural practice and to demonstrate how works of sculpture are in and of themselves archival. The essays presented here were generated from this panel, and they reveal this intertwined relationship in two ways. Firstly, through their discussion of archival resources on sculptural practice and the histories of making they disclose and, secondly, how they point to the ways in which the sculptor uses existing archival collections of sculptural materials and artefacts to think with and through the object of sculpture itself as a documentary record. The essays presented in this issue are an extension of this panel.