Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain — Lives, Work, Careers and Social Change, 1960-2021

From September 2021, I was Co-Principal Investigator, with Dr Anna Douglas, on this research project hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with art historian Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green.

As curatorial researchers, Anna and me revisited and took forward Lorna Green’s study, completed in 1989, of around 250 women working in the expanding field of sculpture, in order to produce a comparative study of sculptor-women working in 2021-22.

The ambition of this feminist research project, which acknowledged the entanglements of age, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, neurosensory diversity and other factors, was to study how the conditions that shape women’s creative lives and aesthetic choices had shifted over the last 30 years. The research also touched on changes in the situation for funding, display and critical reception of art by women. Read our research report here.

The research was funded by a donation from the Holberg Prize awarded to Professor Griselda Pollock in 2020 for her work in feminist studies in the visual arts and art history, and to foster extended research in this field. The project was guided by an Advisory Board of Griselda Pollock, Lorna Green, The Hepworth Wakefield’s curator Eleanor Clayton, sculptors Sokari Douglas Camp and Jill McKnight, and independent art historian Dr. Alice Correia.

The research led to our co-curation of the major exhibition If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960-2023 which opened at The Hepworth Wakefield in March 2023 before touring in an expanded version to London’s Saatchi Gallery from November 2023 – January 2024. Read the Guardian **** review of the exhibition here.

Exhibiting artists: Phyllida Barlow, Glenys Barton, Keziah Burt, Shirley Cameron, Annie Cattrell, Helen Chadwick, Ann Christopher, Lorraine Clarke, Fran Cottell, Katrina Cowling, Nicola Dale, Deborah Duffin, Carol Farrow, Sheila Gaffney, Rose Garrard, Lorna Green, Mandy Havers, Bridget Heriz, Michele Howarth, Permindar Kaur, Christine Kowal Post, Rosie Leventon, Liliane Lijn, Kim Lim, Kara Lyons, Renate Meyer, Cornelia Parker,  Victoria Rance, Freddie Robins, Veronica Ryan, Amy Stephens, Pamela Storey, Wendy Taylor, Shelagh Wakely, Lois Williams