Exhibition
Sculpting Royalty: Hew Locke and Mary Thornycroft
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
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In this film, curator Dr Clare Nadal explores the impact of showing Locke’s art alongside Thornycroft’s, while Alberto Pirro, a PhD researcher, shares his insights on the display.
What happens when the work of a Victorian royal sculptor quite literally clashes with a twenty-first century reframing of monarchy and memorialisation?
This display takes as its starting point the recent acquisition of Hew Locke’s Souvenir 10 (Princess Alexandra) 2019 for the Leeds collection, a reworked Parian ware bust of Princess Alexandra of Denmark produced after a marble original by Mary Thornycroft.
About the artists
The British royal family in all its manifestations, and throughout history, is ever present in the work of Guyanese-British sculptor Hew Locke (b. 1959). For Locke, images of the royal family have functioned as symbols of British power, history and identity.
Working during the reign of Queen Victoria, British sculptor Mary Thornycroft (1809-95) became known primarily as a royal sculptor, patronised by the monarch herself and commissioned to produce portrait busts of over four generations of the royal family.
Main image: Hew Locke, Souvenir 10 (Princess Alexandra) 2019 © Hew Locke. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Photo: Anna Arca.
Related publication
Issue 55 of our Essays on Sculpture journal, Drawing on Sculpture, features the work of Hew Locke.
Drawing on Sculpture
Since the advent the camera, drawing and photography have been combined in a variety of ways. The changing sculpture-photography-drawing relationship is also one that has echoed the fates and fortunes of sculpture and how it has been defined over the last century.
In this issue of The Sculpture Journal Jon Wood outlines the different ways in which artists’ interventions have engaged with this relationship, playing with surfaces to emphasise the raw materiality – and in turn the sculptural quality – of the photograph.
Product details:
Softcover
300 x 210mm
Getting here
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
United Kingdom
T: 01132 467 467
E: institute@henry-moore.org
