Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951

Mapping Sculpture has gathered information from c.2,800 documentary sources held by a range of public and private archives in seventeen cities across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The cities and sources were selected on the basis of prior research conducted during the project Pilot Study in 2005-6. During this initial study, estimates of the number of practitioners and related businesses active during the period were made and as a consequence two key decisions were taken that have shaped the content selection and data entry process. First, the research programme would focus on sources giving information on large groups of practitioners and sculpturally related businesses in a form that required minimal content selection (such as exhibition catalogues and trade directories). Second, that information gathered from sources would be entered into the system in small packets of data to optimise search functionality. The main groups of sources used by Mapping Sculpture have therefore included: exhibition catalogues; art society membership lists, annual reports, accounts and minutes; art school prospectuses and annual reports; trade directories and business publicity materials (such as advertisements in periodicals); census returns, birth, baptism, marriage and death records. Copyright for the content of the Mapping Sculpture database is held by the project at Glasgow University with the rights of all members of the team to have their contributions fully acknowledged on the website.