Abstract
This dissertation, “The Tangible and Intangible: Materiality, Processing Trauma, and the Creative Environment in Sculpture,” investigates how sculptural practice mediates the relationship between materiality and the externalisation of trauma. Grounded in my lived experience, the research explores how materials such as plaster, fabric, and glass become active agents in transforming emotional and physical pain into tangible form. Through a practice-led and autoethnographic approach, the study positions making as a process of negotiation between body, matter, and memory. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of Tim Ingold’s (2013) material entanglement, Gaston Bachelard’s (1958) material imagination, and Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomenology of perception, alongside analyses of works by Jessica Webster and Judith Mason, the research reveals how material encounters evoke both the tangible and intangible aspects of experience. The project proposes that artistic practice does not resolve trauma but reconfigures it, offering a space where emotion and material co-exist in an ongoing dialogue of becoming.