Women’s History Month: Celebrating an Underrepresented Female Sculptor from the Central School of Arts and Crafts

This  article has been authored by Lucy Catherine Parker and Dayna Tohidi.

Lucy Catherine Parker is an Assistant Archivist at the UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre. She has undertaken freelance archival research for historians, curators and community groups. She also has a drawing and painting practice.

Dayna Tohidi is a curator at the CSM Museum & Study Collection and lecturer in object-based learning at Central Saint Martins. She is currently doing the MA Academic Practice part-time and runs her own UAL Short Course, called Inside the CSM Museum & Study Collection.

For Women’s History Month, we are proud to share some stories emerging from a recent collaboration between UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre and CSM Museum.

Last year, we digitised some early glass plate negatives from the CSM Museum & Study Collection. This process enabled close examination and improved accessibility of the glass plates, revealing significant insights about several women who studied sculpture at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the early Twentieth Century.

Digitisation is the process whereby a physical item in an archive or museum collection has a digital version made (through scanning, 3D photogrammetry, etc) to provide access to the object in a new way. Often, it is a good way for providing access when the object itself is quite fragile, or at risk of physical deterioration by handling. The glass plate negatives are physically fragile, as they are glass. But in addition, as early photographic negatives, the chemical substance forming the image on the surface of the glass is also easily damaged.

In the case of the glass plate negatives, scanning them at high resolution has meant that we can access them in a new way. By zooming in to the digital image and adjusting levels and contrast digitally, we can discover more information about the objects than we were able to see, previously. This includes names and dates within the photograph or written on the negatives themselves.

Averil Mary Picot was a sculptor, who was a student at Central School between 1912-1913. The photographic negatives show some of her designs for architectural or object decorations.

They also show a design for a stained-glass window, for which she won a prize. From “zooming in” to the corner of one negative, we can see she won something known as ‘The Queens Scholarship’ which was awarded by ‘W.R. Lethaby 18.3.13’. (William Lethaby, an architect, was a founder of the Central School, and its co-principal until 1912. The current Lethaby Gallery, is named after him).

As can also now be found from digitised material in the Royal Academy’s collections, Picot later went on to exhibit at the Royal Academy in the years 1916 ; 1917 and again in 1941. This shows her continued artistic practice throughout her life.

Other artists whose artwork is credited in the glass plates include a ‘Maud E. Buckton’ and a ‘Muriel Thomas’ and an ‘Ada Peters’ and possibly a ‘Dorothy G Peters [?Petter]’. More research is needed to fill in further details of Picot’s life, and that of the other artists mentioned. But these findings offer new avenues of exploration for the future. The digitised images are available on the UAL Digital Collections platform. These images have also now been digitally preserved as well, using UAL ASCC’s digital preservation system, Preservica.

Find out more View more about the CSM Museum and Study Collection on the website.

For more digitised collections across UAL, visit the UAL Digital Collections Platform.