SCULPTURAL DESIGN

The Margaret Howell Calendar 2016 is here. My husband gets this handsome calendar too which means one stays in its wrappings and one is used well as Margaret Howell would wish with her utilitarian take on beauty.
 
I like to collect these. 2012 was Sea & Coastline, with a selection of work by British printmakers; 2013 British Made - forty years of supporting British manufacturing; 2014 Favourite Building. I can’t seem to find 2015.
 
2016 Calendar is ‘Barbara Hepworth exhibition catalogues 1954-1971.’  In 2015 Margaret Howell was invited by Tate Britain to design an exclusive collection of clothes to accompany Barbara Hepworth Sculpture for a Modern World, a major retrospective exhibition that ran from June to October. The calendar shows a selection of 12 covers mainly from the 1950s and 1960s, which are striking for their visual impact and impress with their pared down design that as MH says ‘conveys the dynamism and power of the works it represents.’
 
Any why I am telling you this? Well because I spent two inspired mornings in the new Cox London gallery, studio and workshop listening to the sculptor-designers Nicola and Chris Cox whose inspired interiors artworks are truly dramatic pieces.  What also struck me is how women sculptors work in such epic and heavy materials such as stone and bronze,
 
I loved the old film at the Barbara Hepworth exhibition with crackly colour footage of Hepworth at work in the Tate exhibition and how tiny she was and how monumental her carvings.  I was thinking that there are women like Nicola Cox who are sculpting powerful pieces for interiors. Nicola studied sculpture and has a background in bronze casting but also spent time working with a glass artist where she learnt to cast enormous vast glass vessels in the same way as bronze.

My favourite piece at Cox London is the White Hart interior sculpture pictured above. If you see the Margaret Howell Calendar 2016, my favourite is September with the 1968 cover showing Pelagos 1946. Meaning sea in Greek, this was inspired by a view of the bay at St Ives in Cornwall, where two arms of land enfold the sea on either side.  
 
coxlondon.com/what-we-do
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