Sculpture is a spatial art, intensely practical, yet essentially philosophical. It has always been closely associated with architecture and public space, with ritual and the ceremonial. It is a private art that is often over-publicised.

Sculpture at the RCA is a longstanding programme, and one component of the School of Fine Art. However our staff and students understand that there is a wider fine art intelligence that falls outside the faculty structure. The debates around painting, often via drawing, and the raw side of printing are closely associated in the minds of good students. The arts of photography, filmmaking, sound and performance, dance, theatre, the sciences, engineering and urbanism are habitual reference points. A spatial perspective allows for particular interpretation, that flours and colours notions of placement, site, ‘edit’, objectness, material and matter. The ‘play’ involved in the processes of production is as much technical as it is philosophical. Mischief, curiosity and fluidity can affect change and shape a future.

Equally important is the sense of London as a destination, what it offers culturally, and as a critique of urbanism, of how façade and underbelly create a frisson. Students, staff and visitors join a mix that is set against these variables, and against the economic contingencies at play.

A successful art school is somewhere in which the students and staff and visitors thrive. It’s a meeting place that allows for a sense of occasion and concentrated debate. It’s also a safe place to be vulnerable and to understand that limitations are not the same as confines and that a sense of inventing protocols and new forms is a great collective vehicle. The desire is to foster a climate of enabling and the confidence to be speculative.

Students of the Sculpture programme are students of the whole College; collaboration and cross-disciplinary debate is actively encouraged. Diversity is not about dilution but rather a means to add rigour to debate and understanding, growing a belief that the power of art can affect change.