IKSP- essay

An artifact is an object made by a human being. Artifacts include art, tools, and
clothing made by people of any time and place. The term can also be used to refer
to the remains of an object, such as a shard of broken pottery or glassware.
Artifacts are immensely useful to scholars who want to learn about a culture.
Archaeologists excavate areas in which ancient cultures lived and use the artifacts
found there to learn about the past. Many ancient cultures did not have a written
language or did not actively record their history, so artifacts sometimes provide
the only clues about how the people lived.

sculpture, an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into
three-dimensional art objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects,
in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts that
envelop the spectator. An enormous variety of media may be used, including clay,
wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found”
objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn,
assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

I believe making sculpture is being caught up with things, a realisation that self
and stuff is always mixed up.
Sculpture sits in the world with us, it is an object like us. Nice.
Sculpture is thinking with things, or considering how things think – contesting the
distinction between thoughts and things, subjects and objects.
Sculpture is promiscuous, wayward and at its best badly behaved.
Sculpture demands practice, risky stuff, of doing and doing and doing, and the
occasional undoing.
Sculpture questions our relationship to objects, to search for the other side of
the commodity object. An art that is concerned with other ways to think and feel.
Sculpture is a great pretender; a fabrication that points to our need for
storytelling and artifice. We have art so we won’t die of truth.
Sculpture networks ideas, articulates subjectivities and creates communities.
Sculpture reflects its place – its society – its time. Our time.
Sculpture negotiates material facts with competing interwoven fictions.
Sculpture is inconvenience, a challenge and the unexpected.
Sculpture doesn’t need to be given the badge of ‘excellence’ or to be continually
instrumentalised for market rationales, for state propaganda, for regional
gentrification. Remember (note to self), the glory of making without destination.
Art is not a thing - it is a way.
Sculptors live completely (make note all early career sculptors).

What is the significance of artifacts?

Artifacts are immensely useful to scholars who want to learn about a culture.
Archaeologists excavate areas in which ancient cultures lived and use the artifacts
found there to learn about the past.

-Cultural artifacts are of critical import to the study of humans and civilizations
over the course of history. Artifacts are the concrete items cultures leave behind,
such as Native American arrowheads, stone tools from early hominid groups,
newspapers archived from the past, or the cell phones, TV sets, and refrigerators
we will leave behind for future generations.

They are important because they comprise primary evidence for scholars to
understand what happened in the past. To appreciate primary evidence, it is helpful
to know what secondary evidence is. Secondary evidence is like secondhand
information; these sources are the textbooks, encyclopedia articles, and/or
Wikipedia pages that provide easy-to-digest explanations of past events. In theory,
scholars and historians have scoured primary source artifacts to arrive at sound
conclusions about the past, and they explain these conclusions to average citizens
in a way that is relevant and clear.

However, scholars and historians are invariably influenced by, and carry the biases
of, their times.

Consider many scholars writing about the Revolutionary Era in the US during the
1800s. These historians described European colonists as "civilizing" the Native
Americans, because they were biased by the stereotypes of their era, which held
that Native Americans were ignorant and childlike. However, many historians began
to take a closer look at Native American cultural artifacts during the 1900s. They
found that Native Americans used shells and precious stones as currency. They also
found evidence of year-round habitation and agricultural practices. By returning to
cultural artifacts—primary evidence—contemporary historians came to a very
different understanding than historians of the 1800s: that Native Americans had
advanced and complex civilizations of their own—they just looked very different
from the European civilizations of the time.

https://sculptors.org.uk/news/2019/12/article-importance-sculpture
https://www.britannica.com/art/sculpture
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/artifacts