Book How to Make Sculpture Move | Ruta Butkute & Emily Kocken

Sculpture, choreography, and installation are the main pillars of Ruta Butkute’s art practice. Her method is guided by a reflective approach to the physicality of sculpture and the relation to the performers, audiences, and the spaces in which they interact. Departing from the principle that an object has a function hidden inside, she redefines the origins and functions of materials and forms  in order to evoke their intricate capacity to move. Her education in ceramics affects her use of primal material aspects, such as weight, scale, mass, and gravity.

During her Rijksakademie residency (2014–15) in Amsterdam, Butkute started to translate sculpture into different mediums. Over the course of several years, she developed a new medium she calls ‘sculptural performance’, which places objects, sculptures, and space in a transformative field, enabling the direction of movement. Actions like grounding, falling, jumping, rising and sinking are keywords in a process close to creating sculptures.

In this book, vital elements of her latest work are brought together to create an experience that manifests Butkute’s unique take on sculpture and performativity. New meanings behind the images unfold via a poetic assemblage of linguistic genres, word play and critical references, culminating in conversations the artist had with her peers on ‘how to make sculpture move’