85. Slow Sculpture: Materials, Methods, and Making

This panel invites contributions from artists and scholars who work on/with late modern and contemporary sculpture associated with slowness, conceived as labour-intensive, processual, temporal, or land-based practices. Slowness encompasses forms of making associated with post-minimalism or process art, for example, the weaving, wrapping, binding, and looping techniques of Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, Lee Bontecou, Maren Hassinger, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and earlier, Ruth Asawa. Fiber, rope, wood, wire, and canvas afforded an ambiguity, malleability, and intimacy conducive to handmade, even meditative, making. Slowness also suggests time- and labour-intensive methods evident in affective, multi-sensory objects by Michelle Stuart, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Senga Nengudi, Robert Gober, Martin Puryear, and others. Although by no means exclusive to women artists, at mid-century, non-traditional methods—twisting, weaving, binding, wrapping, stacking—were associated with repetitive, quotidian, and so-called domestic labour, as well as craft-based materials and practices, which critics often gendered as “feminine,” reproductive, and bodily, even when rigorously conceptual. Contemporary ecocritical approaches to sculpture seen in site-specific works made with plant, animal, or earthen matter by Delcy Morelos, Meg Webster, Wolfgang Laib, and Andy Goldsworthy draw upon slowness as not only a method, but a concept, theory, and ecological philosophy.

This panel seeks intersectional approaches to “slow sculpture” that focus on feminist, queer, race, disability, and ecocritical theories; and, specifically, artists whose work speaks to embodied encounters and critical reflections upon ideas and forms that stray from canonical narratives, queer our sense of direction and understanding through material investigations of (dis)location, (dis)continuity, impermanence, and loss.

Themes:  contemporary sculpture, ecocriticism, slowness

Additional format comment: 20-minute papers

Lead Convenor: Lynn M. Somers, independent scholar, New York

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.