Sculpting the interpersonal: towards a social semiotic framework for analysing interpersonal meaning in statues

The underlying question of this article is ‘how do statues convey interpersonal meaning?’ To answer this question, the authors briefly critically examine the current social semiotic analytical framework for statues and develop a revised framework for analysing interpersonal meaning in which features from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006) and selected features from O’Toole’s framework from The Language of Displayed Art (2011) for analysing sculpture are integrated. These features are also extended and/or complemented by incorporating features obtained from research into the fields of gesture, body language and facial expression. Further, in keeping with Systemic Functional Linguistic-inspired research, system networks are used to map out the potential material and semantic (interpersonal) features for figurative statues and to present possible configurations among these features. Although the focus of this article is on interpersonal meaning, it is acknowledged that within a social semiotic approach, there is an interdependency among interpersonal, experiential (representational) and textual (compositional) meanings, and that these configure within a specific context of situation. This interdependency is only briefly attended to in the article itself, but the proposed framework provides a starting point for developing an account of the way that interpersonal features and their realizations in statues may configure with representational and compositional features and their realizations. With the current world focus on statues and their sometimes controversial social meanings, this article offers a timely opportunity for a range of users such as social semioticians or art educators and students to consider, through a systematic analytical framework, the way in which statues may relate interpersonally with viewers, and provides a key step towards accounting for the way that configurations of interpersonal, representational and compositional features may construe contextual tensions in relation to the overall message conveyed by a statue.