Exhibitions

As a preface to a major international conference on ’Work and the Image’ at the University of Leeds the Henry Moore Institute presented three study displays drawn from its collections, on the image of the worker in the work of the sculptor.

Sculptors followed painters in turning to the image of the worker in their art towards the end of the 19th Century. This theme offered variations on the tradtional stasis of the nude model, movement, purpose, clothing and context. Although these three displays cover a period of nearly a century, and each body of work is utterly different, the links that exist between them are real and provocative. They all speak, in their different ways, of a search for a kind of utopia amid reality, a search that may be retrospective or forward-looking in its nature. Each is closely linked to a particular locale, time and place.

• Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925) and ’The Mower’ at Great Tidnock, Surrey
• Henry Moore (1898-1985) and the miners at Wheldale Colliery, Castleford
• Ghisha Koenig (1921-1993) and the factory workers at St Mary Cray, Kent

This display also speaks of the various phases of industrialisation which this century has witnessed since the 1850s, and of the social displacements which have accompanied them. The artist is caught up in this displacement: Thornycroft in his semi-nostalgic return to the argricultural, Moore in his return to the mining area of his childhood, and Koenig in her work within the factories of post-War Britain. The raise the questions - especially in the case of Moore’s return to the Wheldale Colliery - of whether it is ever possible to ’return home’. The artist’s role is always as an outsider: a worker who is not working.

The displays, principally comprised of notes and sketches, were eloquent about the role of the artist as onlooker and as creator of the image. They reveal the archive as a repositiory for material documenting and the thinking process; the sketchbook as part of the artist’s own productuion-line; sculpture as an articulation of ideologies of work.