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Norma RedpathOBE (20 November 1928 – 12 January 2013) was a prominent Australian sculptor.[1]
Life and work
Norma Redpath studied painting from 1942 to 1948 (with a long break due to illness) at the Swinburne Technical College in Hawthorn, and from 1949 to 1951 sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, both in Melbourne. Her studies there were largely self directed as she found no contemporary sculpture of interest to her in Australia.[2]
Bronze Relief (1964), at McClelland Sculpture Park
While still a student, she was invited to be a member of the Victorian Sculptors' Society (VSS), where she exhibited, and was later Vice President.
In 1953 she was a founding member of the 'Group of Four' with Inge King, Julius Kane and Clifford Last.
During the fifties, she traveled to Europe, and studied in Italy from 1956 to 1958 at the Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, developing a love for Italy and Italian art.[2]
In 1958 she returned to Australia to take up a teaching post at the Swinburne Technical College, and became a founding member of the renowned 'Centre Five' group of sculptors in 1959, a group which expanded from the 'Group of Four' to add (among others) Lenton Parr, Vincas Jomantas and Teisutis Zikaras, who broke with the VSS and organised private exhibitions.[1] In 1960, she was one of the artists selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Six Sculptors exhibition, which was the first exhibition of local modernist sculpture by the Gallery.[2]
By 1961 she had decisively turned to bronze, with Dawn figure, a plaster cast envisaged for casting which was awarded the inaugural Mildara (later Mildura) Prize for Sculpture.[2] The same year she won both the Italian Government Travelling Scholarship and the Dyason Bequest travelling scholarship.[2] In 1962 she pursued her studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where she would later make a base as she traveled frequently back and forth between Italy and Australia. Sculptures cast there formed the basis of her Gallery A exhibition in Melbourne the following year. One of the sculptures was awarded her second Mildara Prize for Sculpture in 1964, and in 1966 she won the Transfield Prize for Sculpture.[2] In 1968 she returned to Melbourne, establishing a studio in Parkville, where she worked on a number of major commissions.[1]
In 1974, while again in Italy, Redpath married Antonio de Altamer, an Italian naval architect. The worked together to refine the technical procedures of the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia and other foundries in the next decade.[1] From the late 1970s she ceased studio work, instead describing her sculptural ideas in a manuscript, Ideas and Images.[2]Sculpture at the ANU School of Music April 2013.jpeg
From 1974 to 1985 she lived and worked alternately in her Milanese studio and Melbourne, and from 1985 she returned to Australia with her husband and set up her third Australian sculpture studio in Carlton. Redpath's husband died in 2000, the same year as her last show, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.[1]
In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from her old college, now Swinburne University. After a long illness, she died in Melbourne in 2013, aged 84.[1]
Works (selected)
Landscape Caryatide1(1985), at McClelland Gallery and Sculpture ParkAreopagitica (1958), Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne
Bronze Reliefs (1964), BP Administration Building, Crib Point, Victoria - relocated to BP building South Melbourne, relocated again to the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park in 1997. (image and details)
Treasury Fountain (1965–1969), Treasury Building, Canberra (ACT) – a two-piece bronze fountain in a rectangular granite pond.
Australian
