Sculpting Space: Bodily Encounters with Architecture

How do bodies move through, with, and against the built environment? Hear from artists Yioryios Papayioryiou, Kensuke Todo, and Augusta Vinall Richardson in conversation with Margaret Hancock as they discuss the spatial and architectural dimensions of their work.

This conversation explores how artists engage with sculptural practice to navigate the relationships between materiality, architecture, and the body. Each artist draws on the language of minimalism, yet departs from its rigid geometries through expressions of irregularity, gesture, and organic form. Together they consider how structure gives way to fluidity, and how materials register touch, time, and traces of lived experience.

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Yioryios Papayioryiou is an artist whose work explores the boundaries between sculpture and performance. His practice is interested in visually translating physiological and psychological responses to constructed space, both architectural and natural. Through a choreographic or performative process that embraces flux, fluidity, and change, his practice explores relationships between materiality and the body.

Augusta Vinall Richardson has established herself as a leading sculptor of her generation. In her industrial metal studio in inner-city Melbourne, she works with sheet and cast metals to make abstract composite sculpture. Her hand is present in the drawing of templates that shape the volumes of her modular assemblages, speaking to but departing from the perfect geometries of minimalism and allowing for the expression of organic idiosyncrasy.

Kensuke Todo is a contemporary sculptor working predominantly with steel, whose practice is largely influenced by his bi-cultural perspective and his experiences of living in Japan and Australia. His work gestures toward imaginary architecture, in-between spaces, and transitional structures. His work combines industrial processes with architectural elements and geological forms to reflect on ideas of tension and balance.

Margaret Hancock is a curator, writer, and cultural producer with over two decades of experience in visual arts, crafts, and design. She is currently Senior Curator at Western Sydney Creative, Western Sydney University, and was previously Curatorial Director at JamFactory, where she led major national touring exhibitions and contributed widely to arts publishing and cultural programming.

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Presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Matters of Time: Contemporary Metal Practices’ at UNSW Galleries, 29 August – 16 November 2025.