Sculpting Lives

Over the last year public sculpture has become a hugely controversial issue. No longer passive objects that we simply walk past on our streets, public sculptures are part of a vigorous debate about contemporary society – who is commemorated and represented, and why. In this episode we delve further into this subject, interviewing the people associated with our most recent sculpture commissions of and by women, speaking to critics and researchers who are reflecting on the historical dimensions of this contemporary moment, and the contemporary sculptors who are making objects that occupy our streets and squares. Jo and Sarah also visit the Breaking the Mould Exhibition: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, organised by the Arts Council Collection, to talk to the curator and some of the artists involved in this landmark display. Together, they discuss the relevance of the public display and exhibition of the histories of women working with sculpture and broader questions about gender and representation in the art world and public sphere in 2021 .

Contributors: 

Digital image: Maggi Hambling, Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft, 2020. Photography: Sarah Victoria Turner

'The thing about my work is that there is a tension between a passionate love and engagement with the traditions of the past and a complete impatience with their irrelevance and it’s trying to hold those things in tension and trying to engage people in the complexities of that.' Cathie Pilkington, R.A.

Cathie Pilkington creates surreal, uncanny and ambivalent forms which are designed to unsettle and provoke. She employs a deliberate lack of hierarchy in her materials, using textiles and found objects alongside more traditional sculptural practices. Her work is often presented as an immersive installation, bringing themes of the domestic and everyday life into the language of sculpture.

During our interviews with Cathie Pilkington in the Royal Academy, her studio and a sculpture foundry, we discuss the barriers to women pursuing careers as sculptors, how sculpture can remain relevant and how an artist can make figurative sculpture that speaks to contemporary audiences. We met her at a pivotal point in her career, taking increasing control and asking questions about the future of sculpture. Pilkington (who was the first female Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools) is Keeper at the Royal Academy and uses her role to ask questions about the history of sculpture and women at an institutional level.

Contributors:

Image: Portrait of Cathie Pilkington in the RA Keeper’s Studio,

Digital image courtesy of Hayley Benoit

Alison Wilding emerged into the art world in the 1980s making powerful sculptural statements out of a myriad of materials. Taking sculpture out of the museum and off the plinth, Wilding’s work is some of the most enigmatic and beguiling sculpture being produced, and in a candid interview in her studio we ask her about influences, materials and her experiences of art school. We also speak to art historians and commercial galleries to get different perspectives on the Turner Prize nominated sculptor. Taking to the art historian Jo Applin about where Wilding 'fits' within the histories of sculpture, she observed: 'You can always search for peer group comparisons or historical, where she might fit in a longer historical trajectory but there's something utterly idiosyncratic to the way in which she thinks in abstract terms that is, for me, one of the most rewarding things about her work.'

With contributions from:

Image: Alison Wilding, courtesy of Karsten Schubert, London.

'She did cause a bit of a revolution in the Royal Academy, which has been only to the good,' Anne Desmet, R.A.

Gertrude Hermes was one of the most experimental sculptors of the twentieth century. She also changed the way women artists were treated at the Royal Academy forever – a story which had been overlooked until recently. Representing Britain at the Paris World Fair of 1937, selected for the British Pavilion at the 1939 Venice Biennale and the subject of a solo retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, Hermes’ reputation fell into obscurity and her reforming activism forgotten.

In the 1920s she was part of a group of artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Eileen Agar who were invigorating traditional techniques with a modernist approach. Working not only across sculpture and printmaking, but a variety of decorative and architectural forms such as door knockers and fountains, Hermes imbued her work with a vital energy that often focused on the elemental forces of nature.

This episode takes listeners to where she lived and worked along the Thames tracing her friendships and patrons, her art school networks and studios; and the work that remains around us. We speak to people who knew Hermes, worked with her, as well as contemporary artists who explain the allure of an artist they describe as a 'goddess'.

Image: Gertrude Hermes carving Diver at St Peter’s Square, 1937. Digital image courtesy of Leeds Museums and Galleries © Archive of Sculptors Papers, Leeds Museums _ Galleries Bridgeman Images,

'I have been preoccupied all my life with a "sense of belonging." Growing up with an awareness of "being apart" has certainly defined who I am now. However, that alienation was in part to do with constantly moving – my parents never stayed in one place when we were younger for very long, so there was little chance of continued friendships, or a feeling of being settled. Being “out of place” characterized my growing up.' Veronica Ryan

In October 2021 Veronica Ryan (born 1956) unveiled her first permanent public sculpture, the Hackney Windrush Art Commission, which will be the first public artwork in the UK to honour the Windrush generation.

In this episode we interview the artist as we walk with her through her exhibition Along a Spectrum at Spike Island, Bristol, recipient of the annual Freelands Award. The award enables an arts organisation outside London to present an exhibition by a mid-career female artist who may not yet have received the acclaim or public recognition that her work deserves and serves to highlight the continued under-representation of women artists in arts organisations in Britain. This is Ryan’s largest and most significant exhibition to date, and we discuss her approach to materials, myriad influences and how visibility and critical acclaim came to her later in life. Along with the artist, museum curators and art historians we talk about issues of invisibility, belonging and identity.

Photo: Lisa Whiting, Veronica Ryan,

Digital image courtesy of courtesy of Alison Jacques, London, and Create, London

“Sculpture has a vital, important message” Dora Gordine (1895-1991)

When Dora Gordine died in 1991 leaving her Studio House to the nation, many people, including museum curators, assumed she had been dead for many years. How did an artist described by art critic Jan Gordon in The Observer in 1938 as ‘very possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor in the world’ disappear from view?

Critically lauded and successful in her early years, Gordine was the first woman sculptor to enter the Tate collection when her ‘Mongolian Head’, 1928 was acquired. Born in Latvia, trained in Estonia and Paris, worked and lived in East Asia. During her career, she produced a significant body of sculpture, often focusing on portraiture and sculpted heads. Gordine’s work prompts contemporary observers to ask questions about her portrayals of people from other cultures and individual identities and we talk to artists and art historians who are grappling with Gordine’s legacy.

In this episode we investigate how Gordine deliberately built a mystique around her identity, frequently changing her age and birthplace to create an enigmatic artistic persona (even the Tate still lists her date and place of birth incorrectly). Taking a modern, professional approach to sculptural production, she established studio homes in Paris and Singapore before settling in Kingston, South London,  designing (without an architect) the purpose-built Dorich House to make and display her art. The monumental Dorich House is now a museum and one of the very few created by and dedicated to a woman sculptor. 

With contributions from:

 

Image: Dora Gordine and April Brummer at Dorich House, 1956. Digital image courtesy of Royal Society of Sculptors

Launching on 2nd November 2021, the second series of the Sculpting Lives podcast features episodes on Dora Gordine, Gertrude Hermes, Veronica Ryan, Alison Wilding and Cathie Pilkington. At a moment when public sculpture is the subject of contentious debate, the final episode of the second series focuses on questions of gender, public sculpture and display, and explores women’s representation — both as subjects and artists — in our public spaces and exhibitions.

Each episode is recorded in places that are significant for the women sculptors featured — their studios, as well as galleries and public places where their work is on display — and includes new interviews with curators, friends, family and the artists themselves, creating intimate soundscapes of their private and public worlds. 

The @SculptingLives Instagram feed contains more information about the podcast and the artists and artworks featured in it.

Sculpting Lives is a podcast series written and presented by Jo Baring (Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art) and Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London).

“I don’t want to use a language that really segregates people. I don’t want to use a language that makes them think about gender – if they are looking at a female artist or a male artist.” Rana Begum.  

 

Rana was born in Bangladesh and came to Britain as a child. She is an artist who works across sculptural materials and crosses disciplines. She is working through what sculpture can be in the world, moving across disciplines like paintings, architecture, design and furniture. She also uses colour and light as materials and doesn’t define herself as a ‘sculptor’ – she calls herself ‘a visual artist.’

 

We interviewed her in her studio, asking about definitions of sculpture, and things which aren’t usually spoken about – how to balance family life and her artistic career, and the problems she has encountered. We asked her about biography, race, identity and Britishness and how these issues feed into her work. 

 

“Living in East London I feel like I’m almost living in a bubble. (You leave and) you are made to remember your skin colour, you’re made to remember your gender, you’re made to remember your religion and all of those things you take for granted when you live in a place like this.” Rana Begum.

With contributions from:

·      Rana Begum, R.A.

·      Anne Barlow, Director, Tate St Ives

·      Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and curator of the British Art Show 9

·      Clare Lilley, Director of Programme, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

“The first time I met him he said ‘Because you’re a woman, I’m not that interested because by the time you’re 30 you’ll be having babies and making jam.’” Phyllida Barlow on meeting her art school tutor Reg Butler

 

Barlow is one of the best- known sculptors working in the UK at the moment and has had major international shows. Unrecognised by the wider world for much of her career, she was an influential teacher to a younger generation of artists during her 40 years at the Slade School of Art before she found acclaim in her 60s. Her work – large scale sculptural installations made from inexpensive low-grade materials – is abstract and seemingly unstable, playing with mass and volume, invading and blocking the space around it. 

In a candid interview in her studio we asked her about how she came to sculpture, how she defines what sculpture is, how she disrupts those ideas, her recent successes and how they have impacted her.

 

“It’s interesting to have those challenges thrown down, but it’s also, you know, you’ve got to muster this tremendous single-mindedness … These things act as the most extraordinary trigger for your future.” Phyllida Barlow. 

With contributions from:

·      Phyllida Barlow, R.A.

·      Edith Devaney, Curator, The Royal Academy

Some sound recordings of Phyllida Barlow in this episode (introduction and in the section from  00.07.20 - 00.13.40) are from her life story interview for Artists' Lives  run by National Life Stories in partnership with the British Library.  Audio (c) British Library Board and Phyllida Barlow.  

“Being female and foreign was never a problem as a student, later I realised that there was a difference, but what was important in the end, was what I did and not where I came from. Race and gender were givens I worked from, perhaps the work does reflect this which is fine, but I did not want to make them an issue.” Kim Lim 

 

Kim Lim was born in Singapore and moved to Britain in the 1950’s to enroll at art school. Despite a successful career (there are over 80 of her works in UK public collections) she has been left out of histories of 20th-century British Art. This episode explores the reasons for that and ask how these exclusions happen.

 

We examine the presence of ethnic minority artists in public collections in the UK – looking at histories of British Art and how to expand the narratives. Kim Lim was married to a successful artist – William Turnbull – and has traditionally been viewed in that context. We also consider the posthumous work that her family have done to secure her legacy and reputation. 

 

 “She never wanted to be perceived as being ‘other’ just because she was a woman and foreign.” Bianca Chu, Deputy Director, Sotheby’s S2. 

With contributions from:

·      Alex Turnbull, Son of Kim Lim

·      Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and curator of the British Art Show 9

·      Bianca Chu, Deputy Director, Sotheby’s S2

Image: Kim Lim with Abacus (1959), ca. 1959, courtesy of the Estate of Kim Lim