I like the way the Royal West of England Academy building is old and complex, making it a bit of a warren to explore, with unexpected treasurers round each corner, and the smell of the cosy café with its real coffee and organic health food, a constant temptation.
This winter the RWA’s overarching theme is Women with Vision, and they are showing four separate exhibitions of women artists designed to celebrate:
1. Vote100, the centenary of women gaining the vote. (In 1918, Parliament passed an act granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, or graduates of British universities. About 8.4 million women gained the vote. It was only in 1928 that Parliament passed the Representation of the People [Equal Franchise] Act that extended the voting franchise to all women over the age of 21, i.e. granting women the vote on the same terms as men.)
2. 140 years since the RWA opened its doors The RWA has always featured women among its members and exhibitors, and is celebrating the fact.
Frink-Blow-Lawson
The main exhibition space at the RWA consists of two very big light airy rooms upstairs. These are currently housing a joint exhibition of work by:
- Dame Elisabeth Frink CH DBE RA (1930 to 1993)
- Sandra Blow RA (1925 to 2006)
- Sonia Lawson RA RWS RWA (b.1934)
Elisabeth Frink
Dame Elisabeth is known for her haunting sculptures, generally figurative, of animals or people, always done in a way that you can see the hand modelling, the working of the clay which made up the original casts i.e. very much not smooth and perfect, sometimes looking like they’re the carbonised remains of burnt up bodies. There were nine pieces, big and small, in the main gallery.
Sculptures by Elisabeth Frink at the RWA. Photo by Lisa Whiting
I wanted to like them, but none of them really did it for me. Certainly not as much as her two enormous pieces which have been strategically placed in the RWA’s main entrance hall, In memoriam III and Walking man. These are much more impactful.
In Memoriam III by Dame Elisabeth Frink. Photo by Lisa Whiting
Maybe I lack subtlety and refinement, but these two pieces just have a semi-cartoon, slightly science fiction effect, which I find immediately compelling.
Walking man (Riaces I) by Dame Elisabeth Frink. Photo by Lisa Whiting
Also these works are fairly widespread and have become a little iconic. Not to the broader public, maybe, but to gallery goers. I’m sure the Bristol Art Gallery just down the road has a similar head by Frink Tate in London has a version of the walking man. And I saw a version of the monumental head in the Lightbox Gallery in Woking a year or two ago. Maybe I like them because they’re familiar.
Sandra Blow
Sandra Blow’s works are massive abstract works, generally with rags and scraps of material attached to the canvas to make them 3-D and break up the surface. There was no particularly consistent use of shapes or patterns. Compared to artists I’ve recently seen like Jean Arp (blobby zoomorphic shapes) or Mondrian (rigid geometrical lattices) Blow’s designs feel bigger, freer, incorporating whatever shapes, swirls or gestures, take her fancy and feel appropriate.
Installation view of the Sonia Blow room at RWA. Photo by Lisa Whiting
I liked the scale and freedom of all of them, but particularly warmed to Breakwater and Helix.
Sonia Lawson
Lawson’s work appears to come in two completely different flavours, both using oil on very big canvases but to completely different effect. On the left wall are very figurative works depicting works with titles like Grieving woman, Portrait of my mother, Garrison town.
Installation view of paintings by Sandra Blow. Photo by Lisa Whiting
I didn’t warm to the naive use of figurative people, in a kind of rough, dirty realism style. On the opposite wall hung a set of much more abstract works. She River was inspired by poems by the poet Linda Saunders and depicts a dried-up river bed with dragonflies hovering over it. A photo cannot convey the extent to which Lawson has incised and engraved lines all over the canvas, creating a rich sense of texture. Close up, this incision and scouring is incredibly exciting and vibrant.
She river by Sonia Lawson (2005)
This is the lightest and happiest of the works here, but all of them use this technique of incision and carving into the paint to great effect. Next to it is the completely different Herd (1996), which consists of rows of deer depicted in the primitive style of cave paintings, ordered in rows as in a frieze from the ancient world. Very powerful.
Installation view of paintings by Sandra Blow. Photo by Lisa Whiting
Women of the RWA
There’s a door from these two big main exhibition spaces into a suite of four smaller rooms.
Two of these are devoted to ‘Women of the RWA’. Women were admitted to the RWA since its foundation in the 1840s and these rooms give a comprehensive selection of work by women RWAs over the past few centuries.
From the earliest ones – cheesy chocolate box paintings of cats by Augusta Tallboys – right through to ultra-modern sculptures and canvases, and featuring such famous names as Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, Gillian Ayres OBE and Vanessa Bell.
The work is so utterly varied that it’s impossible to make any generalisations except that – there have obviously been scores of interesting women artists born or based in the South-West. In this photo you can see Double Hare by Sarah Gillespie (in the middle) and Fishes by Chien-Ying Chang (on the right).
Installation view of Women of the RWA. Photo by Lisa Whiting
I like the RWA. Away from London, it feels less pressurised, less high profile, less big money. The art is always more varied, more relaxed, more unexpected. You can like what you fancy.
Cornelia Parker: One day this glass will break
The final room in the set is devoted to an exhibition of work by Cornelia Parker OBE. She has been experimenting with photogravure which, as I understand it, is a technique which involves placing objects on prepared photographic paper to create an image which isn’t a photograph in the conventional sense, but which nonetheless captures the object, with a spooky aura.
They’re all conventional print-sized black-and-white works, depicting wine decanters, glasses, cups, light bulbs, grapes and so on – a kind of experimental photographic twist on the still life genre.
Installation view of One Day This Glass Will Break. Photo by Lisa Whiting
Parker is most famous for the works where she submits objects to extreme physical treatment, blowing them up as in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) or the wonderful Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989) where, as the Tate website puts it, she selected:
‘a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires.’
That strikes me as being post-modern, conceptual, punk art genius. By contrast, this series of photogravure prints was pretty enough but not, I felt, in the same imaginative league.
Anne Redpath
On the ground floor is the small exhibition room where I saw PJ Crook’s exhibition, Metamorphoses, a few months ago. Now it’s showing works by Anne Redpath, the first woman elected as a Royal Scottish Academician. They are brightly coloured, often dominated by red.
To be honest, I was so overflowing with impressions from the previous wealth of images and sculptures, big and small, that I didn’t have the head-space to do this justice.
Related links
The RWA has a very good visual presence on the internet. Its website has galleries of images for each of its exhibitions, and it has a great photostream on Flickr.
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