Charles Coulthard

My work is questioning how we view sculpture and design, highlighting the importance of plinths in contextualizing sculpture, by placing functional objects on these plinths, they question what a sculpture is and where the line blurs between sculpture and design, for example, the plunger plinths are made from toilet pipes which I stuck together, this directly relates the plungers function. By designing plinths that relate to the object’s function I am contesting the boundaries between sculpture and design. Although there will never be an answer to the question of combining sculpture and design, I can provoke questions of what objectively questions and contextualizes these objects, apart from the obvious subjective visual elements that are on the surface level. For this project I found it hard to design an outcome as this is a widely known debate on how we define art and design, I struggled designing subjects ‘sculptural’ design but these were based on my own opinion of what appeared ‘sculptural,’ but through vigorous research and testing I found that I could not base my project on my subjective ideas, so I searched for fact-based answers to this debate, what I found was that the only thing that distinguishes these disciplinaries in the context of the object. E.g if a piece of furniture was placed in a gallery this would be viewed as a sculpture, and conflictingly if someone sat on a sculpture does this make it furniture. These are the sort of questions my plinths answer and visually layout how blurred the lines between sculpture and design are.