Spotlight On: Virginia Lloyd-Tait's Retrospective Exhibition

Virginia Lloyd-Tait's incredible 30-year retrospective exhibition of sculptures opened at Clara Street Gallery earlier this month. Fellow sculptor and TBSSS student Martin Williams reviews her exhibition, which is showing until 12 September.

Virginia Lloyd-Tait’s exhibition at Clara Street Gallery is a retrospective journey in life and sculpture. 

 It's an odyssey of Blood, Sweat, and Tears. But it is also one of Music. Blood first: until 3 years ago Virginia worked full-time in plasma research and supply, while also lending her talent as a board member of Tom Bass Studio Sculpture School until 2020.

The first impression is that there is much work here. A lot of sweat! In this powerful exhibition we are simply surrounded by women, works beautifully curated by Elena Murgia, where the essence lies in an exploration of the figure. The human figure is an essential touchstone of sculpture, thus the number of busts of classical women that counts Botticelli’s Venus, and amongst others, a renaissance lady Virginia has named Isabella, is reaffirming. Casting an eye right around, while admittedly portrait heads marginally dominate the female torsos, in their midst, my sirens’ call out of the whole show, is a robed body of undeniably Greek descent, beautifully expressed.

The sweat goes on. When you look at her work you gain the sense of hard work she has applied together with her eyes, hands, and body, an intense labouring that has achieved a result with which Virginia can be eventually satisfied. This labouring is not confined to the material. These sculptures all take much time. Just look closely at the industry in each of these works, the observation clearly evident in her portraits and the detail applied to each of them. It’s obviously an interesting way of working. Rather than using sketching as part of the process, her preferred way it seems to me, is to draw, if you like, using clay. So not with a sketch book or using a pencil. So it feels in being confined to drawing in the clay, in her portraits particularly, while referencing more static and definite printed images as her aide-memoire, this process results in a particularly definitive realism and quality.

We also find out that Virginia has been a faithful follower of Tom Bass since 1997. She talks fondly at his regimentation and instruction, his mantra to ‘form,’ and of course, the famous ‘Tom’s Thumb’ mark in clay! She is also unfailingly grateful to all her teachers at Tom Bass. The adventure of learning, such as engaging with new material, the magnificence of working with white Carrara marble, sparked through Virginia’s long time association with Usama Alnassar at TBSSS, followed by her overseas pilgrimages to Carrara and Alnassar’s atelier Summer School there. In fact, marble and music have both played a notable part in Virginia’s and Roger’s life, a signal moment being Usama’s impromptu son et lumiere concerts, where Roger on his guitar, accompanied Usama on his oud.

While this exhibition is testament to her prowess as a sculptor, it is also one of her roles as a wife, mother, and a grandmother. So it’s easy to see an important inspiration has been her family, where more emotion and tears take over. A bust of her mother, who died early, and one of her sister, upon whom in childhood, she came to depend. Both stand alongside her beloved husband Roger, the latter portrayed in Carrara marble. Then another emotion—a recent striking figure in marble of her daughter in pregnancy, and sitting by, a tiny baby, the head of her beautiful grandson. Just outside the main display stand more heroes, a magnificent bronze of her boss at Douglass Hanly Moir and a double header, two portraits of Bob Dylan!

In these works we experience a particularly human exploration of emotion that unfolds before us, an intimacy that she makes accessible to her audience. While we can gain raison d’etre and real knowledge of many of these works through helpful explanatory notes on the sculpture labels, in this exhibition I am struck by the element of belief in Virginia’s work and where she is heading with it. I feel a deep intimacy and connection, particularly in the way of using form and her searching for a sense of emotion, where we see these two important elements coming together. That Virginia’s exchanges have ranged from consideration of mastering additive skills, matching that with the subtractive ones, and in tackling the philosophical issues in engaging with the human figure in both clay and marble, with such panache, speaks volumes. And Virginia, blood, sweat, and tears included, is having a lot of fun doing it.

Heed this siren’s call and come to this wonderful student of sculpture’s Clara Street Gallery exhibition, 1A Clara Street, Erskineville, now!

Thank you Martin for this wonderful review!