Matt Rugg: The Many Languages of Sculpture

Examining for the first time the life and work of the sculptor Matt Rugg (1935- 2020), Michael Bird’s impeccably researched text vividly charts Rugg’s parallel careers as artist and teacher in the context of developments in creative pedagogy in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century, and their implications for practice and teaching today. Highlighting the impressive range of Rugg’s output, from his distinctive ’painted drawings’ to large-scale metal constructions, and the unifying strands in his thought, this book skilfully draws together Rugg’s work, ideas and inspirational role as an educator. Lavishly illustrated, it charts successive phases of Rugg’s continuous experimentation with found industrial materials and form, and the subtle interrelationship in his work between two and three dimensions. Dr Harriet Sutcliffe’s research into the Basic Course led by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle, in the 1950s and 1960s provides fascinating insights into both Rugg’s oeuvre and wider developments in British art practice and pedagogy.

Michael Bird is an independent art historian and curator, and author of more than a dozen books, including St. Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time (2008, with a new edition being published in 2023), George Fullard: Sculpture and Survival (2017) and Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-Century Britain (2018) (all published by Lund Humphries). In 2016 he was National Life Stories Goodison Fellow and in 2018-21 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter. In 2022 he co-curated Living the Landscape: Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and the Artists of St Ives at the Museum Belvé dè r Dr Harriet Sutcliffe is an artist, curator and researcher. She is Associate Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, where she completed her PhD, focused on the Basic Course at King’s College, in 2021. Recent projects include Undutiful Spirit, a Baltic Artist’s Archive Residency (2022), and Matt Rugg: Notations, Passages, Intervals at the Cut Gallery (2022). She is curating Matt Rugg: Connecting Form at the Hatton Gallery in autumn 2023.