Associations of Properties

According to Mary Stewart in Launching the Imagination, "Every material has unique psychological associations as well as physical properties . . . [no matter the design] materials have meaning" (258). I feel that this is a true statement because the viewer of the art is supposed to assume that everything the artist did within their work was intentional. I feel as though this must be true for everything-- for example, this idea is not limited to installations or sculptures. When someone uses tools as simple as say, a pencil and paper, one can associate the properties of graphite with the earth and naturalness since it is composed of the natural element carbon, and paper also with the sense of naturalness since it is derived from trees. Or the graphite can take on a different meanings due to its metallic color that could signify coldness, hardness, or even outer space. The paper can also be made of cloth that signifies many different ideas for example, "to conceal" much like our clothes conceal our bodies or virtually anything that one may think of when they hear the word cloth. It is also important to keep the subject matter of the art in mind, in order to detect what the author intended to tell their viewer with their media choices.