If Not Now, When?

15 Nov 2023-22 Jan 2024

Overview

As part of our Season of Sculpture, our co-headline Winter exhibition, If Not Now, When? will feature 29 remarkable female sculptors, celebrating their contributions to the world of art from the 1960s to now.

The exhibition is divided into three chapters and explores time as an everyday lived experience marked by the evolving cycles directly affecting women. 

WOMEN’S TIME: celebrates unique feminine values, such as life givers, preservers, and carers of others. 

TUMBLING THROUGH TIME: is preoccupied with the materiality and immediate urgency of issues such as climate change and the growing sense that time is of the essence.

THE TIME IS NOW: addresses distinct moments in history, bringing works together to present visitors with the reality of reoccurring injustices and discrimination addressed by each artist.

Exhibiting Artists

Phyllida Barlow, Glenys Barton, Shirley Cameron, Annie Cattrell, Helen Chadwick, Lorraine Clarke, Katrina Cowling, Deborah Duffin, Carol Farrow, Sheila Gaffney, Rose Garrard, Lorna Green, Mandy Havers, Bridget Heriz, Michele Howarth, Permindar Kaur, Rosie Leventon, Lilane Lijn, Kim Lim, Renate Meyer, Cornelia Parker, Christine Kowal Post, Victoria Rance, Freddie Robins, Veronica Ryan, Amy Stephens, Pamela Storey, Shelagh Wakely, Lois Williams 

The exhibition was curated by Eleanor Clayton and co-curated by Dr Anna Douglas and Dr Kerry Harker.

This exhibition is the outcome of a two-year research project, Hepworth’s Progeny, guided by an Advisory Board of Griselda Pollock, Lorna Green, The Hepworth Wakefield’s curator Eleanor Clayton, sculptors Sokari Douglas Camp and Jill McKnight, and independent art Historian Dr. Alice Correia. The exhibition was co-curated by Dr Anna Douglas and Dr Kerry Harker. The project revisited research into women artists working in the expanding field of sculpture undertaken in the late 1980s by Green in her M.Phil thesis, The Position and Attitudes of Contemporary Women Sculptors in Britain 1987-89 at The University of Leeds.