The Creation of Form in Sculpture - II

Another way to generate these concaves, convexes, planes and edges is through focussing on 'the line'. This is of course most manifest in drawing; less so in sculpture. By paring down your process conceptually right down to the essence and seeing the formation of form as a conformation of lines, you achieve a different way of constructing form.
I personally do this most explicitly in what I've come to refer to as my 'coil' pieces. e.g: 
from before:

 and more recently:

And here is an example of the limitless growth possibilities of line:

Gego. 'Line as object' at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

Gego, Reticulárea, 1969 - Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas - Courtesy Paolo Gasparini - Archivo Fundación Gego

Interested in the limitless growth possibilities of a line, Gego (1912-94) expanded it into planes, volumes and expansive nets, to reflect on the nature of perception.

Gego was born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, 1912, and emigrated to Caracas in 1939 immediately after finishing her architectural studies in Stuttgart. She began working as an artist in the 50s in Venezuela and eventually became a Venezuelan citizen in 1952.

The Henry Moore Institute now exhibits Gego’s work a faithful exploration of the possibilities of line as object.

Gego. Line as Object investigates the artist's unrivalled engagement with the problems of form and space, using light, shadow, scale and gravity, in a constant process of discovery. This first UK solo presentation of Gego underlines her visionary approach to sculpture, a terminology that she refused to use for her own work. In one of her notebooks she exclaimed: 'Sculpture, three-dimensional forms of solid material. Never what I do!' Sculpture is concerned with weight, scale, gravity, light, space and encounter: terms embodied by Gego's study of the line as object.

Gego, Sin título, 1987 - Courtesy Claudia Garcés - Archivo Fundación Gego

In Gego. Line as Object, the selection of works in span a thirty-four year period. It begins in 1957, when Gego explicitly began to address sculptural thinking with the work 'Vibration in Black'. This torso-sized continuous form of painted black aluminium hangs from the ceiling, gently responding to air movement and spreading its volume through shadows. 

The latest works are from 1991, when Gego concentrated on her 'Tedejuras': interlaced paper strips that combined reproductions of her own works with pages from magazines and gold cigarette wrappings. Between these two dates Gego made large-scale nets, columns and spheres that filled gallery spaces; watercolours, ink drawings, prints and lithographs, exploring line in space – producing hand-sized sculptures made from material found in her studio as well as sculptures stretching between buildings in her home city of Caracas.

The Gego Foundation in Caracas, where research for this exhibition was conducted, holds the artist's book collection that includes an annotated copy of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form (1917), a book that has lodged itself within the consciousness of twentieth-century sculpture and that is the subject of a concurrent Gallery 4 exhibition.

Gego, Bichito 89 29, 1989 - Courtesy Claudia Garcés - Archivo Fundación Gego

Gego. Line as Object is a collaboration between the Henry Moore Institute, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Research in Caracas has been assisted by Fundación Cisneros.

The presentation at the Henry Moore Institute is supported by the artEDU Foundation.