This reflective commentary is an exploration into pragmatic and encouraging ways of how to become actively involved in the field of social sculpture. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’ famous quote ‘every human being is an artist’, this practice-based research study supports the hypothesis that, as potential artists, each human being is highly talented, and therefore able to bring great value to their communities and to the wider society. It suggests that one meaningful gift we could make to our society is developing and employing our talents – our unique inner capital – for social benefit and the common good; and that the consequence of this significant contribution would be synergetic growth and development of both individual and social capital. Therefore it would be of equal benefit to individuals, society, and environment. This study is informed and inspired by a set of dialogues and exchanges with Professor Shelley Sacks: the founder and director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, and a leading expert, researcher, and developer in the field of contemporary social sculpture. The core part of this practice-based study, which is entitled the ‘Energy Trees’ project, is an exploration of how to create a space and conditions in which individuals can focus consciously on their positive qualities. The main components framing this practice are social sculpture strategies such as gifting attention, visualising the invisible, reflective dialogue, and imaginal thought, combined with its central methodological element of positive focus. Together these elements create a methodology that enables a more enlivening, encouraging, and connective way of perceiving the self, its social value, and its potential to contribute to sustainable and humane forms of social development. This process has been undertaken with twenty self-selecting participants who nevertheless reflect different backgrounds and age groups. Offering an artistic counterbalance to the destructive negativity, which seems to predominate in many current views, the visual embodiment of these twenty processes has confirmed the diversity and richness of human talents, capacities, and strengths. This study has also confirmed that more frameworks in which individuals could engage with their invisible inner capital are needed.

This thesis explores both the conceptual register and tropic play of sculpture as a fine art in some of the key writings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It serves to show how sculpture is both shaped by and reshapes in turn philosophy's explicit register of sculpture as an art form. The central argument within this thesis is that sculpture turns its back on philosophy as soon as philosophy casts sculpture out of its mould. Registering sculpture as a fine art within philosophy reveals that whilst specific examples of sculpture may appear to confirm the conceptual meanings ascribed to it by the philosophers Kant, Herder and Hegel, can equally show its unreliability and inconsistency as an art form. The title of this thesis The Philosophy of Sculpture: The Sculpture of Philosophy serves as a heading for an engagement with an explicit reading of sculpture as a fine ati and the sculptural as a trope. Therefore, the sculpture of philosophy is read as a heading for the presentation of sculpture as an object or art form in the writings of Kant, Herder and Hegel. The philosophy of sculpture appeals to an engagement with the use of the sculptural through the tropes of casting, moulding, sculpting, carving, modelling, shaping and forming in the writing of philosophy. This will show that there is something specifically philosophical about sculpture as a practice. Furthermore, the crossovers between these two approaches highlight the effects they give place to, particularly in the context of reading sculpture through a case study. Therefore, the latter half of this thesis engages with the ways in which the sculptural appears within architectural formations and explores an alternative reading of sculpture in relation to some of the themes generated out of a collaborative project between the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman.