In 1988 the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, held a joint exhibition of the work of Winifred Turner and her father, Alfred (also a sculptor). She had trained at the Central School of Art and Design, along with her sister Jessica, and Winifred then went on to the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1920s.
Turner and her father worked in the style known at the time as "New Sculpture', of which Jacob Epstein is the best-known practitioner. This was a move away from Edwardian academicism towards a vital modernity expressed in clean, stylized lines. Turner added her own specific touch. Unlike her father's, her work is never narrative. Neither is it sexually explicit, as Epstein's and Eric Gill's often is, although it is seductively sensual. There are references to other cultures in her work, often in the arrangement of the figure, which is sometimes reminiscent of goddesses from some Asian religions, as in Tate's bronze sculpture of a seated woman, Thought (exhibited 1933). According to her sister, Turner often arranged a large mirror in her studio and posed for herself. This double role as artist and model may account for the subtlety of her representation of the female form, which was admired by the actor Vivien Leigh, one of her patrons. Turner also showed women in their modern incarnation. Her Land Girl, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1945, wears contemporary clothes, even down to her Wellington boots.
The Studio in the following year (vol.132 July-December 1946) carried a reproduction of one of Turner's sculptures, an elegant composition of a seated nude girl, to illustrate the type of work produced by the Royal Society of British Sculptors. The society was receptive to women's work. Kathleen Lady Kennet served on its council and Feodora Gleichen had instituted an annual award for women sculptors. By 1930 Turner had been elected both a Fellow and then an Associate, and was teaching at the Central School, where she had studied. |
