Today on Studio Sunday we’ll take a look at contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren. While Warren’s sculptures might appear at first glance to be abstractions, many of them reflect the way that the figure, especially the female form, is portrayed in popular art and media.

Rebecca Warren's studio environment in London (seen in the above photo) is very important to the outcome of her work. Notably, she works primarily in unfired clay which means that the tactility and feeling of the hand-formed clay is very present in the finished piece. Warren's studio must be a jumble of half-worked pieces of clay, sculpting tools, paints, and various arts-and-crafts supplies. She often incorporates the detritus found in her studio into her sculptures - pom poms, bits of wood and foam, and other items that might otherwise be dismissed as junk, all find their way into her works as valuable components of sculptures, or as artifacts in vitrines.

The artists touch is intentionally clear in her work, and because her subject matter – the female nude – is often seen as an object of desire or beauty, the act of touching seems even more important here. Perhaps it takes on almost vulgar quality. Warren has also been known to bronze her globular, unfinished-looking sculptures, thereby again subverting the tradition of bronzing as something reserved for perfect, realistic statues.

Warren was born in London, England in 1965 and studied at Goldsmith’s college. She won the Turner prize in 2006.

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