The ‘English Independents’: some twentieth-century women carvers

Abstract

This article explores work now perceived to be at the margins of the tradition of direct carving in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of object-based contextual research relating to the Barbara Hepworth retrospective at Tate Britain, a number of rediscovered or little-known works were located, made by women artists who were, broadly speaking, peers of Hepworth’s, but whose work has since fallen from public view. Drawing upon a range of catalogued and uncatalogued archives held in both public and private collections, in addition to contemporary records of exhibition and key publications by scholars such as Kineton Parkes and Eric Underwood, the biographies and careers of these artists are summarized with particular reference to the existing works, and an attempt is made to situate the works aesthetically and thematically within the context of a developing modernist tradition in Britain in the crucial period between the wars.