50 Women Sculptors

How many women sculptors can you name? This book will challenge perceptions that sculpture is a male pursuit and help you to understand the work and lives of dozens of incredible women sculptors - significant artists from the past as well as those working in the exciting and varied world of sculpture today.

, p>Includes 25 pioneering female sculptors: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Camille Claudel, Frances Loring & Florence Wyle, Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa, Alina Szapocznikow, Yayoi Kusama, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Elisabeth Frink, Eva Hesse, Judy Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Annette Messager, Rebecca Horn Phyllida Barlow, Mona Hatoum, Katharina Fritsch, Cornelia Parker, Doris Salcedo, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Anya Gallacio, Sophie Ryder. And in their own words, we hear from 25 contemporary women sculptors making original and ground-breaking work. Features dozens of colour images of the sculpture and installations from: Tabatha Andrews, Rachel Ara, Annie Attridge, Helaine Blumenfeld, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Silke Dettmers, Laury Dizengremel, Jane McAdam Freud, Lucy Glendinning, Maggi Hambling, Kendra Haste, Holly Hendry, Christine Kowal Post, Sophie Marsham, Nnenna Okore, Arundhata Patel, Maya Ramsay, Marianne Reim, Frances Richardson, Raphaele Shirley, Susan Stockwell, Sinta Tantra, Almuth Tebbenhoff, Patricia Volk, Zhang Yaxi With an overview of women making sculpture from the 1880s to today, this book explores the work of 50 extraordinary women artists who have forged a name for themselves in a male arena, as well as breaking rules, pushing boundaries and inspiring us with their visionary creations. With many colour photos will appeal to all lovers of the arts; this book is essential reading for students of the arts, culture and gender studies

An overview of women making sculpture from the 1880s to today that explores the work of 50 extraordinary women artists who have forged a name for themselves in a male arena, broken rules, and pushed boundaries.
Joanna is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Sculpture Practice at York St John University and she has over 15 years' experience of teaching in education and in prisons. As a sculptor she has had numerous exhibitions and has written many articles about art and sculpture notably: 'Cutting up conference papers: audience participation in breaking as making' in Artistic Research: Strategies for Embodiment, McGuirk, Tom & Fentz, Christine (eds.) Nordic Summer University Press (2015), 'Breaking as making: A methodology for visual work reflected in writing' in Art and Destruction, Walden, Jenny (ed.) Cambridge Scholars Press (2013). www.joannasperrynjones.carbonmade.com
Cheryl is a film-maker, writer and editor who worked at the BBC for several years and then taught film-making at the University of Westminster. In addition, she created a publishing company, publishing over 200 international writers. As a writer, she has won the Croydon Warehouse International Playwriting Competition and as co-editor, published Celluloid Ceiling: women film directors breaking through, the first global overview of women film directors and Silent Women; pioneers of cinema voted best book on silent film in 2017. www.cherylrobson.net
Head of Heritage Collections and Chief Curator at House of Commons responsible for the Parliamentary Art Collection, the Historic Furniture and Decorative Arts Collection and the Architectural Fabric Collection. Formerly Curator of Sculpture at the V&A.
Sophie Ryder is a sculptor who infuses playfulness in her works using wire-framed sculpture, sometimes on a monumental scale. Born in London to a French mother, as a child, she spent her summers in France and loved Picasso's work. His image of the minotaur influenced her own work. Ryder first studied at Kingston Polytechnic (1980-81) and then combined arts at the Royal Academy of Art (1981-84) but was encouraged to pursue sculpture by Sir Hugh Casson, the then director of the Royal Academy.​ She was appointed artist-in-residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park on leaving the Royal Academy. Combined with her animalistic subject matter, her major works are often situated outdoors where they draw upon nature to reflect the character of her subjects, such as the giant Crawling Lady Hare. She decided to use the figure of a hare, with its feminine and fertility associations, as a counterpart to her Minotaur figure. Ryder modelled the hare's body on her own. Her giant hybrid creatures, part human, part animal explore human sexuality and emotion, often inspiring awe in the viewer who chances upon them in a public place. She is not concerned with simple representation, seeking to work on a mystical level. Ryder makes an initial maquette and then scales this up to full size. Her treatment of the bronze surface is unique. At the initial plaster stage, she gouges out sections of her work and adds in elements to give texture, such as old machine parts, wire, paper and plaster. Ryder enjoys working on a large scale, despite the construction challenges. She says she tries to: "make sure that the wire is not too dense and that the light can still shine through, so that when they are walked around they give a feeling of movement that helps to bring them to life." In 1994 a sculpture of five minotaurs fell foul of church censors and was banned from an exhibition at Winchester Cathedral because of the prominence of their genitalia. In 1996 she created an installation called Temple to 200 Rabbits for the Hignell Gallery in London. Her work is now held in dozens of public and corporate collections. She lives on a farm in the Cotswolds with her partner and four dogs and has a studio in Provence, France.
Maggi Hambling CBE (born 1945) lives and works in London and Suffolk. Hambling studied with Lett Haines and Cedric Morris, and then at Ipswich, Camberwell and the Slade Schools of Art. In 1980, she became the first Artist-in- Residence at the National Gallery, London, and in 1995 won the Jerwood Painting Prize (with Patrick Caulfield). In 1998 her sculpture A Conversation with Oscar Wilde was unveiled at Adelaide Street, London, facing Charing Cross Station. In 2003, a sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten was unveiled at Aldeburgh, Suffolk titled Scallop and in 2005 Maggi was awarded the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture for Scallop. Her work is represented in major collections internationally, and in the UK these include the British Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery. Recent museum shows include: Maggi Hambling: Walls of Water at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2013) and the National Gallery, London (2014), War Requiem & Aftermath at Somerset House (2015), Maggi Hambling: Touch, a retrospective of works on paper at the British Museum (2016), The Quick and the Dead: Hambling, Horsley, Lucas, Simmons, Teller at Hastings Contemporary (2018), Maggi Hambling: For Beauty Is Nothing but the Beginning of Terror at both CAFA Museum, Beijing and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2019).
Lucy Glendinning was born in 1964 and lives and works in Somerset. She studied Fine Art Sculpture at University of the West of England, Bristol. After leaving college, she worked for Elizabeth Frink in a bronze foundry, learning how to do casting. She has exhibited extensively including at the Ashmolean Museum, Royal Academy London, Grand Rapids Art Museum, USA, Abbaye Saint-Riquier, La Halle Saint Pierre Museum, Paris, Halle14, Leipzig, Centre d'Art Contemporanian, France, Boras Museum of Modern Art, Sweden, Meijer Sculpture Gardens, U.S.A. and the Saatchi Gallery London. Glendinning has completed 11 public commissions throughout the UK, which have won several awards including the Civic Trust Award in 2009, and 2011, the Landscape Institute Award in 2010 and 2011, and a 'Red Rose award' in 2011. Most recently, she has had a solo exhibition at Da-End Gallery in Paris and a large exhibition at Villa Tamaris Museum of Contemporary Art in Toulon.
Kendra Haste MRSS grew up in Putney and graduated from Wimbledon College of Art (1990), achieved a B.A. Honours in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts (1993) before studying for her masters degree at the Royal College of Art where she became interested in wire mesh sculpture. In 1999, she won the BBC Wildlife Art Award with her sculpture of a baboon. She has since established a considerable reputation in her field with work included in collections worldwide. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, the Society of Wildlife Artists (UK) and a signature member of the Society of Animal Artists (USA). Public sculptures in the UK include an elephant at Waterloo Station, London, 13 works at the Tower of London, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces in 2010 and a rhinoceros at Cannon Hall Museum, Barnsley. Her work is also in the collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming.
Born in Australia, raised in Nigeria, and now living in USA, Nnenna has received international acclaim for her richly textured abstract sculptures and installations. Her highly tactile sculptures combine reductive methods of shredding, fraying, twisting and teasing with constructive processes of tying, weaving, stitching and dyeing. The recipient of many awards including a Fulbright award in 2012, she earned her B.A. degree in Painting from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (First Class Honors) in 1999, and subsequently received her MA and MFA at the University of Iowa. A participant in over 100 solo and group exhibitions, her works have been shown at the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Peabody Essex Museum at Salem, Salem; Tang Museum of Art, Skidmore College, NY; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art, New York; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; Museu Afro Brasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NY, and October Gallery, London.
Frances Richardson was born in 1965, Leeds, UK and received her MA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London in 2006. Previous to this, she studied BA (Hons) Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich. She exhibits both nationally and internationally and her solo exhibitions include: In times of brutal instability, Chiara Williams Contemporary Art, London Art Fair 2018, Loss of object and bondage to it Fig.2, Bermondsey Square Sculpture Commission, Vitrine Gallery, London 2015, and Ideas in the Making: drawing structure, Trinity Contemporary, London 2011. In 2017 Richardson was awarded the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and Chiara Williams Contemporary Art SOLO AWARD and nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2015-17 in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery.
A British artist of Balinese descent, Sinta Tantra was born in New York in 1979. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London 1999-2003 and at the Royal Academy Schools London 2004-06. In 2017 she was the first recipient of the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellowship at The British School at Rome. Tantra currently lives in between London and Bali. Highly regarded for her site-specific murals and installations in the public realm, commissions include; Karachi Biennale (2019); Sharjah Islamic Art Festival (2019); Honor Hills, Seoul commissioned by Hyundai (2019); Facebook HQ London (2018); Lee Tung Avenue, Hong Kong (2018); Folkestone Triennial UK (2017); Newnham College, Cambridge University (2016); Songdo South Korea (2015); Royal British Society of Sculptors (2013); Liverpool Biennial UK (2012); Southbank Centre (2007). Solo shows include: Modern Times (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London 2020); Your Private Sky (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London 2018); A House in Bali (ISA Art Advisory, Jakarta 2017); Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong 2016) and Fantastic Chromatic (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London 2015). International group shows include: On the Nature of Botanical Gardens, (Framer Framed, Amsterdam 2020), Strangers in Town (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin 2019), Woven & Illuminated, (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin 2019), Voyage to Indonesia, The World Bank, Washington (2018); Tetap Terang / Always Bright, ISA Jakarta 2018; High Noon, Accademia Belle Arti di Rome, Rome (2017), Quotidian, Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai (2017). Awards include: British Council's International Development Award (2014) and The Pyramid Deutsche Bank Award (2006).
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she ascribes her need to create something "well made" to her father who was a builder. She studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, then at Bath, and now has a studio in Somerset. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Buekenholf-Phoenix Gallery in Belgium, Chichester Cathedral, and the Royal West of England Academy. It has also been acquired for the collections of Swindon Museum & Art Gallery, Lord Carrington, Anthony Horowitz OBE, Simon Relph CBE, the British Consul (Ivory Coast) and Mary Portas. She was Regional Winner of the ING "Discerning Eye" prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Brian Mercer Residency. One of her pieces was also selected as a Southern Arts prize. In 2017 she was invited by the Designer Crafts Foundation to go to Israel as a guest sculptor. Her commissions include Water Deities and Audience and Muse and her work is included in numerous publications including The Sculptor's Bible by John Plowman. She is represented in the UK by the Hannah Peschar Gallery, the Sheridan Russell Gallery and the Blackwater Gallery, Cardiff.
Born in France, Laury Dizengremel is an award-winning sculptor with public works located in Honduras, Vietnam, South Korea and China, as well as France, Canada, Ireland, Wales and England. Her lifesize portrayal of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown was installed on the Thames Walk in Hammersmith in 2017. She has been Artist-in-Residence for the Belvoir Castle estate in Leicestershire for over eight years, conducting workshops in schools as well as creating a number of artworks for the Duchess of Rutland. An obelisk she created was featured on More 4 TV in a programme hosted by Alan Titchmarsh. Dizengremel exhibits personal works in exhibitions such as biennales at Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire, and several of her monumental works are permanently exhibited at Broomhill Sculpture Gardens in North Devon. One current project is the first ever full figure portrayal of the writer Virginia Woolf for Richmond Upon Thames.
Contemporary Chinese sculptor Zhang Yaxi lives and works as a professional sculptor in Chongqing (formerly within Sichuan province), China. She has created monumental sculptures up to 7 metres in height, and her sculpture has been exhibited in several international sculpture symposia and national sculpture exhibitions as well as being commissioned for public and corporate spaces. The Gate of Life, a monumental urban sculpture in bronze, was created during the China Changchun International Sculpture Symposium 2001. Pregnant, was a monumental snow sculpture created on a frozen lake in Harbin, China. Honorable Hero - General Ba is a monumental work created during the 4th International Sculpture Symposium of Vietnam in December of 2003. Her award-winning Mother and Child is a monumental sculpture for the city of Golmud in Qinghai Province, and she collaborated on the Tennis Terracotta Warrior series for the ATP/Tennis Master Cup Shanghai 2007 with fellow sculptors Laury Dizengremel and Shen Xiaonan.
Helaine Blumenfeld (born 1942) is an American sculptor particularly known for her large-scale public sculptures. She creates works primarily in marble and bronze but also in granite and other materials. Examples of her work are in the collections of Clare College, Cambridge, the Courtauld Gallery and the Smithsonian. Amongst her large-scale public works are 'Family' in granite installed in Henry Reuss Federal Plaza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 'Tempesta' in marble at The Lancasters, London; and 'Fortuna' in bronze at Canary Wharf, London. A fellow and past vice president of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, Blumenfeld was awarded an Honorary OBE in 2011. She lives in the United Kingdom and works there and in Pietrasanta, in Tuscany in central Italy.
"It shows a wide range of sculptural practice with interesting interviews giving insight into the artist's process."--Clare Burnett - President RSS "Royal Society of Sculptors"
50 Women Sculptors is a beautifully illustrated book which presents the world of undervalued and under recognised women sculptors from the past as well as a selection from the present, with in depth interviews on their life, inspirations, working methods and use of all materials mentioned above - an improvement compared with the past but there is still room for full equality to be achieved. For those interested in sculpture, whether practising sculptors or researchers, or those at the start of their careers, this is an extremely valuable book and perfect introduction to encourage further research and interest in sculpture by women.--Lorna Green, sculptor & environmentalist "Longer academic review"