In 1989, the sculptor Lorna Green circulated a questionnaire among 320 of her female peers about their experiences as women in a male-dominated field; three years ago she sent a follow-up survey. The work of 29 respondents to both is currently on show in an instructive exhibition, If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2023 at the Saatchi Gallery (until 22 January). They include Kim Lim (1936-97), who is the subject of an overdue retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield. 

Lim’s stone carvings were a revelation to me when I first saw them at Camden Arts Centre in 1999, but it’s only now, with this first full career retrospective, that audiences have the chance to follow her development from the found wood and painted steel forms of the 1960s through to the carvings in marble, Portland stone and granite on which she focused from the late 1970s. In whatever medium – including prints and paper cuts – her art was always spare and graceful. It was important to her ‘to make a clear, unfussy statement of form’.

Lim’s sculptures draw you into their orbit; Frink’s arrest you

Born in Singapore to a Malaysian-Chinese family, Lim came to London aged 18 in 1954 to study sculpture at Central St Martin’s under Anthony Caro and Elisabeth Frink. When Caro, still in his figurative phase, belittled her first forays into abstraction, Frink advised her to move to the Slade. But it was her extensive travels, first alone and then with her husband, the sculptor William Turnbull, that constituted her ‘main art education’. In Greece, Italy, Egypt, Cambodia, Japan and China, the architecture impressed her as much as the art: ‘I found that I always responded to things that were done in earlier civilisations that seemed to have less elaboration and more strength.’

Her stone carvings close the gap between ancient and modern, the grooves in ‘Windstone’ (1989) recalling the fluting of ancient Greek columns and the slashes in ‘Column P’ (1984) the sliced canvases of Lucio Fontana. Nature was a key influence on surfaces that look worked by the elements rather than hammers and chisels. For a sculptor, Lim was refreshingly unconcerned with mass and weight; in her hands carved stone feels as light and luminous as air. I don’t normally covet sculpture – I’ve nowhere to put it – but the cabinet of her 1980s maquettes I wanted to take home.

Elisabeth Frink working on the ‘Dorset Martyrs’ Memorial’, 1985. Credit: © Anthony Marshall/Courtesy of Dorset History Centre. Artist copyright in image kindly approved by Tully and Bree Jammet

As the only woman selected for the 1977 Hayward Annual, Lim achieved an unusual degree of recognition, though she never attained the status of Dame Elisabeth Frink R.A. (1930-93), the subject of a new show at Dorset Museum on the 30th anniversary of her death. As a major beneficiary of the Frink estate, the museum has a permanent display of her work, but this exhibition focuses on her final years in Dorset, where she moved with her third husband, Alex Csaky, in 1976. 

By then, as a figurative sculptor, she was no longer regarded as ‘cutting-edge’. She had never been a follower of fashion. As a rising star in the 1950s – the Tate bought her ‘Bird’ in 1952 when she was still a student – she had rejected the post-war ‘Geometry of Fear’ label applied to her male contemporaries. Yet her animalistic bronzes of the 1960s look like augurs of doom: her ‘Mirage’ series – ‘part-bird, part-stalking beast, but not entirely either’ – is the stuff of nightmares and her ‘Carapaces’ are as bestial as anything by Francis Bacon.

Lim’s sculptures draw you into their orbit; Frink’s arrest you. Her life-sized male bronzes – standing, sitting, walking, running, flying, falling – have a physical presence rare in modern sculpture other than Rodin’s. Powerful male physiques are more commonly associated with classical sculpture, like the 5th-century Greek bronzes that inspired her 1980s ‘Riace Warriors’. ‘Walking Madonna’ (1981) for Salisbury Cathedral was one of only two female figures she ever sculpted. She was more interested in figures who wielded power in a world she felt was ‘heading towards a new dark age in human relations’, yet her alpha males feel strangely vulnerable. Her sinister ‘Goggle Heads’ were inspired by a Moroccan general accused of ‘disappearing’ an opponent, caught by a press photographer hiding behind an enormous a pair of dark glasses.

A marvellous photograph from 1991 in the exhibition entrance shows Frink in her Woolland studio, seated side-saddle on her ‘War Horse’, arranging its mane with hands covered in plaster. She worked alone, only using an assistant for her final sculpture, the ‘Risen Christ’ for Liverpool Cathedral when she was dying of cancer. She is missing from the Saatchi show, perhaps because she didn’t bother answering Green’s survey; after her 1985 retrospective at the Royal Academy she may have felt she had little to complain about. She does now. Since her death, like Lim, Frink has been marginalised. But I’m willing to bet her hombres will retain their potency when Sir Antony Gormley R.A.’s mannequins are gathering dust.