My Soap Is a Sculpture ...

Continuing to log my preparation for the Tunnel Gallery Artist in Residency I plan to document this stage of the process of the project with photographs of objects of interest and a variety of clay forms. The found objects are either newly found or long treasured and the clay forms are newly made and some are part of past explorations. 
In fact I have been doing such 'explorations' for several years now. Some I have logged on this blog, others not, because they existed in an as yet undefined context. The context, however, has now become defined with the Tunnel Residency. Which is one of the reasons I'm delighted with the prospect.
The purpose of gathering these finds and clay forms is to instigate questioning and discoveries. Questioning about art, sculpture, 3D form, installation. And discoveries about working with chance, seeing and finding things of beauty and artistic interest in our surroundings, be it in nature, at home, at school.
So ... I'll begin with one of the more challenging, and most recent, 'finds': a bar of oatmeal soap (hence the flecks), two remnants of an almost used up bar stuck to a new one and then used for some time, creating the softer, rounded contours. The images are rather two dimensional, so the sculptural element is somewhat reduced here. Still, it is clearly a three dimensional object, with an aesthetic beauty, and all the more beautiful - in my eyes - because it came about through happenstance. I saw it one morning and thought 'this is interesting, visually/aesthetically and conceptually', 'this is Art'. 

Is it Art?      

If I hadn't said it was a bar of soap, would you relate to it/connect with it as a 3D painting or a wall sculpture? Can you see beyond the fact that it is a bar of soap? More easily probably in these images. If you saw it here, in real life, you might find it difficult, impossible even to see anything but a bar of soap. But what if it's displayed on a plinth?
In an art gallery?

Would that make access to it easier? 
Would an audioguide explaining what the artist is aiming to achieve make it possible for you to engage with this sculpture?
...