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PUBLIC ARTS
Hubert dalwood - untitled bas-relief
1961 â– Aluminium – silicon alloy
stage@leeds
Dalwood was born in 1924 in Bristol. He was apprenticed as an engineer to the Bristol Aeroplane Company before serving in the Royal Navy from 1944-46, returning to study at Bath Academy under Kenneth Armitage. He was awarded an Italian Government Scholarship from 1950-51, which he used to work in a bronze foundry in Milan, later returning to teach at Newport School of Art from 1951-55. Awarded a Gregory Fellowship in 1955, he worked at the University of Leeds until 1959. During this period, he was commissioned by a number of universities including Oxford, Manchester and Liverpool.
In 1961 Dalwood was commissioned to produce this large aluminium bas relief frieze for the University’s hall of residence, Bodington Hall. Dalwood used clay worked by hand to form casts which were translated into cast metal abstract forms and powerful shapes. When Bodington was closed, and then demolished in 2013, the work was stored, cleaned and relocated to its new site at stage@leeds. In 2012 Historic England listed the work, granting Grade II status, in recognition of the sculptor’s ‘new venture on a wholly different scale and technical complexity to anything he had previously made’ and its historic interest as an example of public art commissioning by universities during the sixties.
Untitled Bas-relief
Barbara Hepworth - Dual Form
1965 â– Bronze
Outside stage@leeds
Lent by Leeds Art Fund (Leeds Art Gallery)
Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1903, Barbara Hepworth enjoyed a lengthy career over 50 years, until her death in 1975. She is regarded as a pre-eminent British sculptor, along with her peer and fellow Yorkshire native, Henry Moore, gaining high recognition for her work during her life time. In 1965, the year that she produced Dual Form, she was made Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) and was also made the first female trustee of the Tate Gallery – a position she would hold until 1972. Dual Form is one of an edition of seven bronzes, a medium that Hepworth began working in towards the late 1950s. Despite her transition from working in wood to bronze, Dual Form reflects Hepworth’s earlier style, with its simple form and pierced hollows. The sculpture is on loan from Leeds Art Gallery and was acquired by the Leeds Art Fund in 1967.
Dual Form
MITZI CUNLIFFE - MAN-MADE FIBRES
1956 â– Portland Stone
On Clothworkers' Building
The American sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe (née Solomon) was born in New York and is renowned for having designed the famous theatrical mask for the BAFTA award. Cunliffe was active as a designer of jewellery, textiles and glass, as well as teaching in later life. She studied Fine Art at Columbia University from 1935-40. In 1949, she came to England when she married a British academic and moved to Manchester. Her first large-scale public piece was created for the Festival of Britain in 1951 – Root Bodied Forth which was an 8-foot concrete group. In 1955, the same year she designed the famous BAFTA award, she was commissioned to create a major piece for the new Man-Made Fibres building at the University
of Leeds. Professor JB Speakman, Head of the Department of Textile Industries, required a piece which would reflect the exciting progress in the field of synthetic fibres. Cunliffe submitted drawings and a maquette for a vast pair of hands with textile fibres crossed between them, to be executed in Portland stone. Man-Made Fibres was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh when the new building was opened in June 1956 and now 60 years on, the work has just been conserved so it can be seen again in its original state.
Cunliffe spent her entire working life bringing sculpture and architecture together. She wanted her work to be ‘used, rained on, leaned against, taken for granted’, declaring that her life-long dream ‘is a world where sculpture is produced by the yard in factories and used as casually as bricks’.
In this case however, Man-Made Fibres is positioned so high on the Clothworkers’ Building South that it can easily be missed.
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Man-Made Fibres on Clothworkers' Building
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Mitzi Cunliffe at work in her studio on Man-Made Fibres
Reference: University of Leeds. CURATING THE CAMPUS: PUBLIC ART TRAIL.