This wonderful film of the Yorkshire based sculptor Austin Wright was made by Harry Duffin when he was living in Hull. Harry explains how the film came about: “when I was a sculpture student at art school, in the early sixties, Austin came to give a lecture to us and I remember him being very inspirational. Round about 1970 I saw there was an exhibition of his work in Hull and naturally went to it. I was knocked out by his work and became determined to make a film about him for posterity and...

This wonderful film of the Yorkshire based sculptor Austin Wright was made by Harry Duffin when he was living in Hull. Harry explains how the film came about: “when I was a sculpture student at art school, in the early sixties, Austin came to give a lecture to us and I remember him being very inspirational. Round about 1970 I saw there was an exhibition of his work in Hull and naturally went to it. I was knocked out by his work and became determined to make a film about him for posterity and to hopefully present his work to a wider public. I contacted Austin who was very happy with the idea, and I applied to the YAA for a grant.” This brought Harry into contact with Nina Hibbin, the Films Officer of the Yorkshire Arts Association, who provided grants for aspiring filmmakers. The YAA made some 50 films between 1970 and 1986, including one on another Yorkshire artist Kate Barnard in the same year as this. This was a productive year for the YAA, with its first Director, Michael Dawson, founding the Ilkley Literature Festival also in 1973.

Harry hadn’t so much as held a cine camera before making this film, and he remembers the editing process of cutting and splicing as being a nightmare: “After I had spent a couple of long days putting together the A and B rolls I realised I had got them out of synch by a few frames and had to undo every splice and redo it. I nearly gave up at that point but I'm very glad I didn't.” Having worked briefly as an art teacher, at the time of this film Harry was with the Hull Spring Street Theatre Company founded by TV producer Barry Hanson and playwright Alan Plater. Here he worked for ten years as theatre designer, company manager, director and writer for the rep and youth theatres. Harry went on to have a highly successful career writing scripts for BBC Radio, ITV and the BBC Television Drama Department, for example for Coronation Street, and especially in children’s TV with, among others, Cloud 9, the Enid Blyton Adventure Series, William Shatner's A Twist in the Tale and The Tribe.

The music for the film – which very much sets the tone and chimes wonderfully with its subject – was composed and played on the piano by Jim Hawkins. Harry Duffin believes that he played it backwards for the film.  Jim Hawkins also went on to become a playwright and TV writer. He wrote a 13 part drama series about the motor industry in the Seventies, On The Line; a TV drama-doc about the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, Houston We Have a Problem; co-wrote a play on the Hull triple trawler disaster of 1968, The Northern Trawl; and co-wrote some TV dramas with Anthony Minghella when he was living in Hull in the early 1980s.  In 1973 Jim was a popular presenter on Radio Humberside based in Hull, where he still lives.

That the film came to be made clearly owes much to Nina Hibbin. Harry remembers Nina as a fascinating woman.  Nina started out working aged 16 for Tom Harrison and Mass Observation, and for Picture Post, documenting reactions to the Second World War in the East End of London – where she also joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. She became the film critic for the Daily Worker (later The Morning Star), the newspaper of the Communist Party, before joining YAA in 1971. As well as championing unfashionable films, Nina campaigned to get Rank to release Ken Loach’s Yorkshire based film Kes in 1969. In the mid-1970s, she became programme director of the Tyneside cinema before retiring to the village of Boulby, formerly of the North Riding of Yorkshire (now Cleveland).

Now no longer in existence, the Yorkshire Arts Association (the regional arm of the Arts Council) has contributed much to the arts life of Yorkshire. Its chairman between 1969 and 1980, Lord Feversham, was a powerful supporter of the project to create the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, launched in 1977, displaying works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and others, including Austin Wright, in the parkland of Bretton Hall College near Wakefield. He was also a champion of the work of Austin Wright, placing his monumental Two Rings on a ridge of the North Yorkshire Moors on his Duncombe Park Estate above Helmsley – which very soon became vandalised  (first by scrap-metal thieves) and now sadly no longer exists. 

Yorkshire has a strong association with sculptors, with not only the more famous Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth both being born here – from Castleford and Wakefield respectively – but also Ralph Brown, Lawrence Burt, Victor Newsome (Leeds), George Fullard, Kenneth Martin (Sheffield), Carl Plackman (Huddersfield), and John Wragg (York), to name just some of them. Austin Wright was in fact brought up in Cardiff, of English Quaker parents. Having taken Modern Languages at New College, Oxford, Austin trained to become a teacher and in his first post in 1934, at The Downs, near Malvern, taught painting and sculpture as well as French and German.   W.H. Auden was also teaching at the school, and Austin acted as a witness at Auden's wedding in Malvern to Thomas Mann's daughter Erika – they were both gay, but the marriage provided Erika with a British passport to escape the Third Reich.

In 1937 Wright moved to York (where Auden was born), and while teaching modern languages at Bootham School he began working as a sculptor.   Without any formal art training, Austin, according to James Hamilton, “approached Henry Moore for advice and encouragement, and recalled being told, quite bluntly, just to get on with it.” It was at another Quaker school in York, Mount School, that Austin met his future wife, Sue Midgley, who was a student at the School. As a Quaker Austin was a conscientious objector during the war – as were several Yorkshire filmmakers, see the films of Alan Pickard and Kenneth Raynor. Just after the war Austin and Sue moved into the house where this film was made, in Poppleton, just outside York, and where Sue still lives. Sue gave up her own career, teaching drama, and joined Austin in doing up a very dilapidated house and outbuildings. They had some land where they grew all their own vegetables – very handy in the period of rationing.

Although influenced by Henry Moore, and usually seen as an abstract artist, in fact Austin took his own path, going through several phases in his career, working with different materials and ideas, and making very many sketches as well as sculptures, often figurative as well as abstract. As the film shows, he worked in the barn and long garden of his house, influenced by the village and its past way of life. He was also strongly influenced by the landscape of Yorkshire: his work revealing the inspiration he felt from nature.   

Many people have problems with abstract art. Art, at the very least, involves new ways of looking, finding a form that can give an appropriate expression to this, and then having the skill to realise this vision. The work of Austin Wright certainly displays this in abundance, and it would be impossible to adequately summarise his work here (see James Hamilton). But it is worth remarking on the aptness of the sub-title that Harry Duffin has given to the film, ‘the secret middle’.  Charlotte Mullins, writing in Art Review, June 2000, notes “the concern for negative spaces” (cited in Hart Gallery, References), and Austin himself states in the film his interest in, “How far can you pull things apart and still hold them together”. Where, “all fragments are important” and “each part speaks with the greatest clarity”, Wright’s work tends to undermine the distinction between figurative and abstract – both occupying and revealing ‘the middle’ (not unlike Gillian Rose’s ‘Broken Middle’).

Wright also speaks of how all things are susceptible to analogy, of how the mind searches for analogy, and that this is what happens when we give names to things. Perhaps too often art is judged by what is immediately seen, or heard, and found wanting when there isn’t something obvious, or explicit, that can be related to. But the art of Wright – as in the poetry of, say Wallace Stevens, or the piano music of Eric Satie (or of Jim Hawkins) – reveals what is hidden in the space between things.  One might ask, if everything was made readily apparent, would it be art? For many art requires the work of looking and re-looking.    Hence the ‘minimalism’ that Wright’s work often seems to have – and which is echoed in the tempo, and sparse music, of the film. In showing Austin at work, the film also echoes an observation by Richard Morphet (one time keeper of Modern Art at the Tate), “A work by him seems to me to direct our attention very much to the physical act of its being made, as an activity that is satisfying in itself.” (Judith Macmillan, p 8)

Despite the praise that Austin Wright’s work has received – in the fifties Charles Sewter described him, in the Guardian, alongside Kenneth Armitage and Reg Butler, as ‘The most gifted sculptor working in Britain today’ – he is a greatly neglected sculptor. His work has been exhibited widely, and is on public display in many places, with two sculptures at York University (who awarded him an Honorary Degree in 1977) – see the Hart Gallery website for a listing. James Hamilton has attributed the relative neglect of Austin Wright’s work to the fact that he remained in isolation in Yorkshire, declining to move to London or somewhere he would be more in the public eye. But Austin wasn’t interested in promoting himself, preferring, as Henry Moore advised, “just to get on with it”.   As his friend Leonard Robinson (founder of Poppleton Arts), wrote back in 1994, “He certainly would never engage in the market place intrigues, that so many artists now find necessary, nor ever engage in ‘gimmicks’ to achieve an ephemeral notoriety.” (Judith Macmillan, p 15)

However, there are those who have recently, or still are, promoting Austin’s work: locally, that includes Sally Hebron, of The Friends of York Art Gallery, and York artist John Langton; and also Penelope Curtis, formerly the Curator of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds – which holds the sketchbooks and papers of Austin Wright – and now the Director of Tate Britain.   James Hamilton’s splendid monograph on Austin Wright has done much to keep his work alive, and there is to be a centenary celebration of his work in 2011.  The Hart Gallery in Islington, London, sells his work. Or one can also go directly to Sue Wright, who is happy to show Austin’s work, in situ,  at their house in Upper Poppleton. As James Hamilton remarks at the end of his obituary, “Discovering Wright has been like discovering evidence of a whole new school of art developing in parallel with the known world, a new country on a new morning.”

(with special thanks to Harry Duffin)

References

James Hamilton, The sculpture of Austin Wright, Lund Humphries and the Henry Moore Foundation, 1994.

Judith Macmillan (editor), Austin Wright: A Celebration, William Sessions and the Friends of York Art Gallery, 1995.

Richard Morphet, Austin Wright: Retrospective Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 1997.

Sandy Nairne and Nicholas Serota, British Sculture in the Twentieth Century, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981.

James Hamilton, Obituary: Austin Wright, The Independent

Hart Gallery – Austin Wright

Emily Boyd, ‘Moore sculpture that's just Wright’, The Yorker

Obituary for Lord Feversham, Telegraph

Harry Duffin Biography

Obituary for Nina Hibbin, Guardian