Breaking into the boys’ club
Goes to see a retrospective of the unsung female sculptor Alison Wilding and finds her work puzzling
Stereotypes die hard. In the post-Weinstein cultural landscape, we’re now painfully aware of the obstacles women face in every walk of life, not least the arts. And there would appear to be few art forms as intrinsically hostile to women as sculpture.
I say that in spite of the extraordinary success British women have enjoyed in this field. Yes, Barbara Hepworth became one of the dominant figures in 20th century British art, but at huge personal cost, farming her three children out to relatives, so she could go on working, bringing an immense sense of guilt, and widespread implicit criticism.
More recently, Helen Marten won both the 2016 Turner Prize and the first Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, though with a three-dimensional collage that traditionalists might not consider sculpture at all.
Which brings us to the essential point about sculpture: that it is physically taxing. The manipulation of heavy, messy and often downright dangerous materials has generally been considered best left to men. Whole movements in British sculpture, such as the Sixties New Generation, led by Anthony Caro, have included no women at all.
So it’s salutary to look at the work of an artist who came to prominence as part of a movement that was very much a boys’ club, and who is now, after a period of relative neglect, enjoying a moment of resurgence.
Born in Blackburn in 1948, Alison Wilding was pretty much the token woman in the early Eighties New British Sculpture movement, which brought a breath of street energy to the British art scene.
Her sensual juxtapositions of silk, wax and oil with all-too solid bronze and wood, made her the most prominent woman in this maledominated group. But where Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor became household names, and Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow forged major international reputations, Wilding sank into relative obscurity, despite two Turner Prize nominations (in 1992 and 1998).
However, a few days ago, a display of monumental works spanning 20 years of Wilding’s career opened at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, while in a few weeks’ time, her Memorial to British Victims of Terrorism Overseas will be installed at the National Memorial Arboretum. Later this year a retrospective opens at Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion. Is Wilding finally having her moment?
At the Whitworth, a kind of mysterious gateway formed from interlocking recycled floorboards looms impressively over the centre of the room while a flotilla of silk and paper roses are adrift on a hemisphere of trashed concrete. Your first impression is of art that delights in very physical conjunctions of unlikely materials, but is at the same time dauntingly cerebral.
Each of these works feels like a kind of puzzle to which you have to work out what the question is – never mind the answer. Peering into the bewilderingly irregular floorboard mass of – in which everything is simultaneously right-angled and teeteringly organic – you spy grey acrylic spheres nestling half-hidden in the mind-boggling structure. The contrast of these fragile forms amid the mass of dark, rectilinear wood is peculiarly disconcerting.
Wilding isn’t one for offering explanations of her work: its physical existence is a “meaning” in its own right. Her sculptures seem to exist not just as physical objects, but as repositories for emotions that bleed out into time as well as space.
This is art that doesn’t shout or hector, but requires you to meet it at least half way. On the one occasion I met Wilding, she was unforthcoming, even a little dour, qualities that haven’t, I dare say, helped her profile. Nonetheless, the quiet intensity of this exhibition suggests that women don’t have to play men at their own game in order to create powerful art.
Until Aug 12. Details: whitworth.