Fighting Sculptures

If clay is the medium of a sculpture and a piano the instrument for a song, then people are the medium and the instrument of martial arts.

The sculptures are made of children. Not of anything they built, of them: a block held at the point of contact, a strike stopped at full extension, two or three bodies locked into a shape none of them could hold alone. The techniques are the same ones they already knew as ways of fighting each other. What changes is that a punch lasts a fraction of a second and a sculpture has to be held.

I photographed what they made in April 2018 and worked the photographs into these compositions the following month.

What a child first meets a subject through, decides what they think it is for. Teaching a child to use their body to harm, before establishing why they are learning at all, sets that context badly and is hard to undo later.

Fighting is a medium, but not like paint or paper or plasticine. Those a child comes to empty-handed. This one they already have, and it is already working in them. It has to be recognised before it can be used. A child taught to fight before that happens stays ignorant of something large operating through them, while the training feeds it.

Storytelling, art, acting, music, puppetry, building. Through any of them, the stranger in a child can be made familiar.

By December I had drawn what a live version would look like: karate sculptures held by children, at scale, in front of an audience.

Tryouts were held on 3 February 2019, watched by a few instructors, black belts and parents. Sessions ran from February to June. It never reached the audience it was drawn for.

There are no photographs of the children here, and there won't be. The bodies were the material. What was mine to keep is the form, not the faces.