Laura Gascoigne

How to succeed in sculpture (without being a man)

Elisabeth Frink is the first woman sculptor to be elected an RA, yet she's still not the subject of an academic study nearly three decades after her death

Going to the dogs: Elisabeth Frink, the first woman sculptor to be elected an RA yet still not the subject of an academic study three decades after her death. © Magnus-Lewinska Mayotte/Bridgeman Images

Whee-ooh-whee ya-ya-yang skrittle-skrittle skreeeek… Is it a space pod bearing aliens from Mars? No, it’s a podcast featuring aliens from Venus: women sculptors.

If the intro music to Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture sounds like Dr Who, its two jolly presenters — Jo Baring, director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art, and Sarah Turner, deputy director for research at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art — come across as younger, slimmer, artier versions of the Two Fat Ladies. ‘Jo can talk about Liz Frink’s work until the cows come home,’ Sarah informs us at one point before warning Jo: ‘You’re going to have to convince me a little bit. Dogs, horses… that’s what I think of when I think of her work.’

Male sculptors measure themselves against their peers; women sculptors, outside the hierarchy, go it alone

A better title for this five-part series would be How to Succeed in Sculpture Without Being a Man, and with children in tow. Between them its female subjects had 14 — Barbara Hepworth four, Elisabeth Frink one, Kim Lim two, Phyllida Barlow five and Rana Begum two — which was an image problem in a discipline traditionally regarded as male, as well as a test of time management. When Barlow arrived at the Slade in the mid-1960s her tutor Reg Butler told her bluntly that he wasn’t interested ‘because by the time you’re 30 you’re going to be having babies and making jam’. He then challenged her to name a woman sculptor ‘apart from Barbara… Let me tell you, there are none’.

Barbara was the exception, the woman sculptor who got to play with the big boys by combining iron discipline with naked ambition. Hepworth was a hustler, tirelessly courting potential buyers, dealers and gallery directors: when Wakefield Art Gallery, now the Hepworth, couldn’t afford to buy a sculpture she had persuaded an early collector to offer at a discount, she got her father to buy it and give it to them.

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