AT THE NORTHEAST corner of London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there is a tall (15 feet high), wavelike, metal art work. I am undecided whether this sculpture by Barry Flanagan (1941-2009), who began studying at St Martins School of Art shortly before my mother stooped sculpting there, is a flattering addition to the historic Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Called “Camdonian” and constructed with a kind of steel, it was created in 1980.
It was restored in 2022, but now (April 2025), it is covered with graffiti and dirt including bird droppings. It needs to be cleaned up. As a sculpture, it appeals to me, but I do not feel that it enhances the locality where it is placed. Although it is large, it looks a bit lost where it is.
WHEN WALKING IN Kensington Gardens March 2025, I spotted three trees planted in an open space outside the Serpentine South art gallery on the west side of Kensington Gardens. Taller than many of the trees around them, they had not been there when I visited the area in November 2024. Without foliage and with few branches, they seemed dead when compared with the trees growing near them. We revisited these unusual trees today (13 April 2025), and they looked wonderful in the morning sunshine.
It does not take long to see that these trees have unusual features. Two of them have unwieldy granite boulders lodged in their branches. The third tree looks as if it has been split open by, for example. a lightning strike. Parts of the wood of this tree have been painted gold. Though in some respects these three tall objects look like trees, one realises quickly that they are not trees but artworks.
Created by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (born 1947), they are part of an exhibition of his works, most of which are housed within the Serpentine South Gallery. Penone was a leading artist in an Italian artistic movement known as ‘Arte Povera’, which focussed on exploiting the simplicity of natural materials with artistic techniques. According to the Serpentine’s website, Penone said of his exhibition:
“All of my work is a trial to express my adherence and belonging to nature, and it is with this thought that I have chosen the works for the exhibition. The two paths that I have created—inside the gallery and outside of it, in the park—become two integrated gardens.”
The three tree-like sculptures both impressed and intrigued me. I have yet to see the works inside the gallery, but there is still plenty of time to view them as the exhibition continues until 7 September 2025.
THERE ARE MANY sculptures by Henry Moore (1898-1986) in London’s public spaces (see: https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/where-to-find-henry-moore-sculptures-in-london). One of them, “Knife Edge Two Piece”, can be seen on College Green, opposite the Houses of Parliament. Consisting of two huge pieces of bronze, this was created by Moore between 1962 and 1965. Its form was inspired by a fragment of animal bone, as are many of his other sculptures. When we visited Moore’s home in Perry Green (Hertfordshire), we saw display cases filled with bits of bone the artist had collected over the years,
The sculpture outside the Houses of Parliament is one of three casts of the same work. The other two are in Canada and the USA. Moore donated the sculpture that stands in Westminster, to the Nation in 1967. In 2011, it became part of the Parliamentary Art Collection. It is now a listed object. It is one of only 41 post-WW2 sculptures in Britain to have been awarded the listed status.
Henry Moore is one of the greatest of British twentieth century artists. It is fitting that his sculpture should stand amidst buildings that have played, and continue to play, important roles in the life of the country.
THIS SCULPTURE STANDING in the foyer of the ActOne cinema in Acton is labelled “The Urchin” and dated 1968. The sculptor is named Ute Sturch. I have searched the Internet for information about the sculptor, but found nothing. Does anyone have any information about the life and work of this creator?
DURING THE 1950S and the first half of the 1960s, my mother, Helen Yamey, created sculptures in the sculpture workshops of St Martins School of Art, which was then located on Charing Cross Road. Although my mother was not a student at St Martins, she worked alongside one of the school’s teachers of sculpture, the noted sculptor Anthony Caro (1924-2013). Caro became famous for his metal sculptures that consist of pieces of metal either welded or bolted together. While my mother was making sculptures at St Martins, she like other sculptors including Phillip King, Tim Scott, and William Tucker, was undoubtedly influenced by, and learned from, Caro’s work. She learned welding and created several abstract sculptures that consist of pieces of steel welded together. Unlike Caro, who achieved great fame, my mother, who was unambitious and only created sculpture to fulfil a creative urge, my mother and her sculptures became forgotten.
Today, 8 March 2025, we visited the Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery in central London to see a small exhibition of sculptures by Anthony Caro. Unlike many of Caro’s works, the metal sculptures on display, are not enormous. They are small enough to be fitted comfortably into one’s living room or a small garden. Indeed, one of the sculptures, in my opinion the most attractive, has the title “Table Piece CCCXLI”. It was constructed in oxidised steel. The five Caro pieces in the exhibition display a variety of compositional style, and together demonstrate the artist’s versatility. They were all made between 1970 and 1990. My mother left St Martins before this period, sometime in the mid-1960s. I know that she maintained an interest in Caro’s output, but. Sadly, I cannot recall what she thought of its quality.
SCULPTURE CAN BE APPRECIATED by enjoying the light reflected off it or passing through it, by touch, and sometimes by sounds it makes. Today, at London’s Tate Modern gallery, I saw an exhibition of sculpture that can be seen, but cannot be touched or even heard. The exhibits were beams of light projected onto screens through a room filled with the sort of smoke used in theatres to create haziness. All these exhibits were created by the British artist Anthony McCall, who was born in 1946.
The projected light creates often changing patterns on broad screens. What makes the exhibits really exciting is that the slowly moving smoky haze in the room allows the viewer to see the paths taken by the projected light through space. These three-dimensional envelopes of light produce interesting sculptural forms, but unlike most sculptures, the viewer can move through them unimpeded. And while moving through these space-filling light formations, the viewer modifies their shapes and what is projected onto the screens. The results are both intriguing and beautiful, apart from being quite unusual. Words cannot adequately describe what we saw at this show. You need to experience it for yourself to enjoy this intangible but intensely visual sculptural show, which is continuing until 27 April 2025.
DURING OUR RECENT (January 2025) stay in Pondicherry, we passed an interesting looking doorway several times but it was always closed. Above the doorway are the words “Foyer du Soldat”, and these are superimposed on the French tricolour (red, white, and blue).
On the last day of January, we passed the doorway yet again and this time it was open. Through the doorway I saw what looked like a life-sized statue of General Charles de Gaulle. We crossed the road and entered the building. In the hallway, the large statue, which stands on a plinth with small white plastic wheels, is labelled “Charles de Gaulle”. High above his head, there is a framed photograph of French President Emmanuel Macron. His photograph was not the only one. There were others depicting several past Presidents of France, including: Mitterand, D’Estaing, Sarkozy, and Chirac.
Next to these portraits, there is one of Georges Montout, who has eight medals pinned to his chest and is described as “Fondateur du Foyer du Soldat de Pondichéry”.
“Les Foyers du Soldat was one of the three official welfare organizations; the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. were the other two. They set up canteens for soldiers to go to while on leave, providing a place to sleep, relax, eat, bathe; they even provided entertainment such as music or films.”
Many men of Indian origin living in French colonies such as Pondicherry fought for France during wars including the two World Wars. A French monument to those Indians who died can be seen near the seafront in Pondicherry. The city’s Foyer du Soldat was restored in 2010. It is housed in a colonial building, but I do not yet know when it was first established in Pondicherry.
When we stepped inside the hallway of the Foyer, there was a meeting in progress in its adjoining assembly hall. Although it was built to serve soldiers from Pondicherry as well as local veterans of wars fought for France, I imagine few of those who fought in these campaigns are still living.
IT LOOKS LIKE MODERN sculpture at first sight. On closer examination, these fascinatingly shaped objects have carefully constructed scales, like the markings on a ruler or a protractor, attached to them. They are astronomical instruments that were constructed for the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh (1688-1743), and they were completed by 1734. Together, they comprise Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar (literally ‘calculating instruments’). They were used to construct what has turned out to be extremely accurate astronomical tables.
Sawai Jai Singh was very interested in mathematics, astrology, astronomy, architecture, and literature. He studied scientific works by, for example, Ptolemy, Newton, Flamstead, and Euclid. He had Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry” translated into Sanskrit. His interest in astronomy might have been inspired in1702 by his tutor Jagannatha Samrat.
The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur contains 18 separate stone instruments with metal attachments . My knowledge of astronomy is minimal. So, I will not try to explain for what purpose each was, and still can be, used. A Wikipedia page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar,_Jaipur) can help with explaining their purposes.
To a visitor, like me, who is unversed in astronomy, and to those who are familiar with modern astronomical instruments, the Jantar Mantar presents the visitor with one of the most extraordinary looking tourist sights that India has to offer. It is not unique. In addition to the one in Jaipur, Sawai Jai Singh built four others in northern India. However, the one at Jaipur is the largest and best preserved.
If one did not know its purpose, the Jantar Mantar observatory compound would seem as if it is one of the world’s most superb sculpture parks.
UNTIL ABOUT 1991, my widowed father resided in my childhood home in northwest London. For as long as I can remember, there was a collection of black and white photographs in a cardboard Kodak photographic paper box. The photographs contained images of sculptures, which my mother Helen Yamey (1920-1980) had created at St Martins School of Art in London during the later 1950s and first half of the following decade. In 1991, my father married again, and moved from our childhood home to another address. Every now and then, after my father moved, I used to ask him what had happened to the photographs. He used to reply that he did not know where they were. Maybe, he suggested, they were stored somewhere in the garage of his new home. He died in 2020. After that, I thought that it was extremely unlikely that I would ever set eyes on the photographs again.
A year or two after my father’s demise, his widow, my stepmother, arranged to meet me at a café. When she arrived, she was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which she handed to me. To my great delight, I found that it contained the Kodak box filled with photographs of my mother’s sculptures. I posted a few of these images on the Internet. Some months after that, my friend Edesio mentioned that he was impressed by the images of my mother’s sculptures, and suggested to me that I should write something about my mother and her art. This I have done.
When I began writing my mother’s biography, our daughter Mala, who is an art historian and a curator, sent me a pdf file containing the contents of a catalogue of an exhibition held at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in the 1960s. It contained mention of some of my mother’s work that appeared in the exhibition. Mala did a little more research and discovered the existence of catalogues of other exhibitions in which my mother’s sculpture was included. I investigated these catalogues and came across a few more, I was surprised by what I discovered.
During the first half of the 1960s, my mother’s sculptures were selected to appear in exhibitions alongside artworks created by artists, many of whom are now quite famous. These include, to mention but a few, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Kim Lim, and LS Lowry. These exhibitions were held when I was between 8 and 13 years old. In those days, I was not particularly interested in my mother’s artistic activities and was too young for the names of these artists to mean anything to me. In addition, I do not recall even having been told that my mother was participating in exhibitions, let alone showing her work alongside that of these now famous creators. So, until I studied these catalogues more than 40 years after my mother died, I had no idea that for a while she was in the vanguard of 20th century British sculpture. Had I not been stimulated into beginning to write about her, I would not have known that my mother, who never boasted about her achievements, had been an artist of such a high calibre.
I have written my memories of my mother in a book called “Remembering Helen: My Mother the Artist” (available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DKCZ7J7X/) . In it I have tried to describe her upbringing; what she was like as a mother; and her achievements in the world of sculpture. I have included many of the images I found in the box of photographs, and our daughter has written some insightful notes on her grandmother’s sculptural styles and the techniques. I hope that my book will help bring my mother’s artistic achievements out of obscurity. Modest as she was, I feel that it would be good if she were to get at least a little of the fame she deserved.
My mother, HELEN YAMEY (1920-1980) was born in South Africa. In 1948, she came to the UK, and by 1952, she had become a sculptor. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she worked in the Sculpture Department of London’s St Martins School of Art alongside now famous sculptors including Elisabeth Frink, Anthony Caro, David Annesley, Eduardo Paolozzi, Menashe Kadishman, William Tucker, and Phillip King. Helen’s work was of a sufficiently high quality for it to be selected for showing in exhibitions that included the above-mentioned artists as well as others including David Hockney, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Duncan Grant, and Jean Arp. Yet, unlike the artists listed, she and her work have become largely forgotten.
In my biography of Helen, “Remembering Helen: My Mother the Artist”, I describe her career as an artist, what she was like as a person, and explore why she did not make a reputation like those with whom she worked and exhibited. The book contains illustrations of many of Helen’s sculptures, and my daughter, Mala Yamey, an art historian and curator, has written notes about my mother’s sculptural works.
yamey 