Abstract This essay responds to a broader art-historical imperative to rethink the theoretical, philosophical, and therapeutic relationship between art and ageing. My focus is the soft sculpture that emerged in the 1960s in the USA and UK, taking Jann Haworth’s soft, stuffed figures of older people as a case study to complicate narratives of the decade as one defined by youthful promise. I ask what happens when we discuss soft sculpture not through a language of youthful experimentation and novelty, but instead through the language of old age. In conclusion, I draw on gerontologist, sexologist, anarchist, novelist, and poet Alex Comfort’s writing on ‘hard and soft’ forms of thinking. I propose that ageing offers art historians a productive language with which to write and think about soft sculpture, and about art history in general; and that, conversely, soft sculpture offers a dynamic and unique means to think about the ageing process.
Jo Applin (Wed,) studied this question.