Direct carving

Direct carving is an approach to making sculpture in which the artist works straight into a block of material, stone or wood, allowing the process of carving and the nature of the material itself to suggest the final form, rather than transferring a pre-made clay or plaster model by means of assistants. Established in the early twentieth century, this method was an aesthetic and ethical manifesto: it proclaimed truth to materials, a respect for the texture, grain, and weight of the natural substance. Direct carving restored the value of manual labour and the uniqueness of the artist's own touch, setting them against the academic practice of casting and reproduction. Its leading masters were Constantin Brancusi and Eric Gill, and later Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who believed that form should grow organically out of the material. The ideas of direct carving profoundly shaped modernist sculpture and the very understanding of three-dimensional art.