Born on the bombsite: reconstruction and the maternal body in Beth Jukes’s The Cradle (1949)

Abstract

This article considers an unknown work by an overlooked sculptor: Beth Jukes’s The Cradle (1949), which she carved from a salvaged block of stone on a reclaimed bombsite opposite the Sir John Cass Technical Institute, where she taught sculpture between 1946 and 1975. Women sculptors such as Jukes, who moved between their own practice and teaching, have fallen out of the more mainstream histories of sculpture, thus limiting the attention that their work deserves. This article draws on material in the Jukes family archive to introduce her contribution as a pioneering woman to studies of post-war British sculpture, pedagogy and narratives around reconstruction. Placing a mother and child work in the context of the bombsite, The Cradle affords new perspectives on sculpture and motherhood, linking reproduction and reconstruction directly through the location. Read against the backdrop of women’s roles in the post-war period, when the ‘mother figure’ became a symbol of social restoration and the bedrock of reconstruction after the Blitz, this article questions to what extent the maternal reproductive body was the site of recovery.