This practice-based PhD explores sensations of flux and instability created through the ‘monumental’ sculptural object. The text acknowledges the legacy of Rosalind Krauss’s concept of sculpture’s ‘Expanded Field’ (1978) but moves to affirm a legacy for the monument, thereby circumventing the dialectical logic of her argument. Drawing on the sculptural tradition of the monument, the works produced steer away from minimalism’s objecthood in order to explore a material ‘hapticity’. Modelling is a point of departure for a series of replications produced through diverse modes of casting. By escaping Krauss’s positioning of sculpture as ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not- landscape’, works made within this project engage critically with the idea of the monument (defined through its separation from environment and its traditional verticality) through wall-oriented projection into architectural space. Intermediate sculptures produced within the project are initially manufactured from clay and grease, whose malleability remains as sensation to counter the tendency to identify the object as fixed. Interconnected chapters follow the principles and practices of sculptural production and associated temporalities. Behaviours of matter (such as clay) under certain types of pressures and material conditions, including haptic forming, and the upkeep of material conditions in the service of sculptural production will be examined. Certain unorthodox forms of writing in the main body of the thesis seek to articulate these material conditions and encounters within the process. Material behaviours will be linked to methods of realising sculptural archetypes employing traditional methods of modelling, mould making and casting to produce condensed, singular sculptural forms that eschew representation evident within the legacy of the monument, instead, operating at the limits of recognition.

To further problematise association with the canon, the orientation of sculptures will work against the dominant verticality of the monument. Replication and simulation are brought into focus as cast sculptures mimic archetypes of forms without previous existence. The mould and its association with certain trajectories of sculptural production is understood as a site of material movement capture, a container to arrest sensations of flux embedded into the cast sculptural object. The work of Lynda Benglis, William Tucker, Medardo Rosso and Alina Szapocznikow will form the contextual basis for proposing the existence of sculptural instability, being examples that promulgate sensations of flux enfolded into sculpture and that offer a critique of the monument through approaches to material handling and objecthood. Tucker’s attempt to build sculpture bearing ‘familiarity that resists recognition’ is especially important to this project, where modelling operates at the threshold of formal legibility and works against fixing specific, quotidian identity to the sculptural object. This project argues for a different lineage to the trajectory of the ‘Expanded Field’ through the manifestation of sculptures that draw upon close bodily connection and intimate haptic contact with material. The monumental sculptures of Tucker and intrusive anti- monumental works of Benglis produced during and beyond the emergence of Krauss’s essay offer a divergent route for new sculptural thinking, one that problematises the dominant presence of the ‘Expanded Field’ and instead proposes the sculptural object as something fixed intellectually, yet through the intensification of material behaviours enfolded into the work, operating intuitively as something in flux. Despite being infused with qualities of bodily intimacy and close-at-hand working, sculpture is, paradoxically, referred to as both monument and not monument.