Sculpture made to be worn has gone by many names: wearable sculpture, sculptural jewellery, mobile sculpture, body sculpture. The form has attracted artists, modern jewellers and fashion designers, each approaching it differently. In the twentieth century, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Marisol Escobar, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Niki de Saint Phalle are just some of the artists who translated the language of larger work to an intimate scale. Modern jewellery, which Glenn Adamson called “a magpie art form” that tolerated “a high degree of promiscuity” (Thinking through Craft, p. 21), was for makers such as Art Smith and Margaret de Patta a field in which to challenge jewellery’s identity as supplement. Fashion designers, meanwhile, have worked with sculptors throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for example Elsa Schiaparelli’s collaboration with Alberto Giacometti or Alexander McQueen’s with Shaun Leane.

In the second of a series of recurring themed issues around sculpture and the body, the Editors of Sculpture Journal encourage abstracts that rethink the traditional methods of sculpture in art history through work made to be worn. Renewed attention to craft, fashion and material culture, and to the body as a site where objects are encountered, invites us to ask what wearable work can tell us about sculpture itself. We invite proposals that stem from, but are not limited to, the following: the appeal of working at the scale of the body; the relation between work and wearer, and what it reveals of makers’ desires or anxieties about their craft; materials, techniques and the expanded sense of the sculptural; jewellery as a promiscuous or supplementary form; staging, photography, exhibition and collecting; collaborations between artists, fashion designers and jewellers; movements between amateur and professional status; and the methodological opportunities of thinking about sculpture through jewellery. We are looking at this issue from the early twentieth century to the present and globally, across practices from the modest to the ambitious in scale.

We invite abstracts for articles of approximately 6,000 words from art history and its intersections with fashion history, visual and material culture, and related fields. Please send a proposal (350–500 words) and a short biography (250 words) by 30 November 2026 to

Teresa Kittler (teresa.kittleryork.ac.uk) and
Charlotte Matter (charlotte.matterunibas.ch).

Accepted articles will be due for review in early February 2027, for publication in Autumn 2027.

Sculpture Journal is the foremost scholarly journal devoted to sculpture in all its aspects across the globe. It provides an international forum for writers and scholars in the wider field of sculpture, including all three-dimensional art and monuments. First published in 1997, it offers a keen critical overview and a sound historical base, encouraging contributions of fresh research from new and established names.