Whitwell (2015).4 Sadly, but inevitably, although Gillian Smith and Lindsay Wray were the lead architects of the first phase of Stanbrook Abbey, their authorship has been subsumed under the practice name.5
The dustjacket of the present volume illustrates Byland Abbey and the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, offering a powerful sense of place. Yet, mindful of the canonical impact of the Buildings of England, an opportunity to give visibility to unsung works has occasionally been missed. Publication came too late to note the mischievous demolition in 2021 of the Dorman Long tower in the Redcar steelworks, but the threatened Middlesbrough bus station, by the Cleveland County Architect (1978–82), is still there. Grenville’s description is neutral, yet it is an assertive building with a punchy skyline, carefully planned as a horseshoe to enable segregation between pedestrians and transport, with climate-controlled waiting areas; it signals late twentieth-century municipal confidence.
1 The reviewer was grateful to be in the company of Anthony Geraghty, who joined him in trying out the book. Grenville mistakenly writes that St Agnes was demolished in 2021 (p.465, note).
2 N. Pevsner and D. Neave: Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, New Haven and London 1995. Susan Neave is the unfairly uncredited co-author.
3 R. Harman and N. Pevsner: Yorkshire West Riding: Sheffield and the South, New Haven and London 2018; and P. Leach and N. Pevsner: Yorkshire West Riding: Leeds, Bradford and the North, New Haven and London 2009, reviewed by Lesley Milner in this Magazine, 152 (2010), pp.257–58.
4 For Dott, see E. McKellar: ‘Veteran: Annabel Dott and colonial, metropolitan and rural communities’, in N. Shasore and J. Kelly, eds: Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War, London 2023, pp.219–41.
5 Peter Clegg quoted from personal communication with this reviewer, 25th July 2023.
Carole Gibbons
By Carole Gibbons, with contributions by Andrew Cranston and Lucy Stein. 160 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (5b, Glasgow, 2023), £40. ISBN 978–1–73942–510–4.
by susannah thompsonIn a 2016 article published in Frieze, discussing her creative influences, the painter Lucy Stein (b.1979) wrote a compelling account of the work of her friend, former neighbour and fellow painter Carole Gibbons (b.1935).1 Stein’s compelling descriptions of Gibbons’s paintings, such as Studio interior (Fig.3), include references to her ‘large Jungian vignettes with horses and self-portraits in vivid mindscapes’, her ‘blissed out and bleak’ domestic scenes, the ‘kitchen hallucinations’,
conveying an ‘exquisitely sensitive interiority’ and veering between Sylvia Plath and Pierre Bonnard in terms of tone or affect. The article is a testament to Stein’s longstanding support and advocacy for Gibbons (they have exhibited together on numerous occasions since 2012). When Ben Seeley, the co-founder of 5b publications, read it, he immediately began to search for books on Gibbons’s work, only to realise there were none. This serendipitous encounter has resulted in the publication of the first-ever monograph of Gibbons, launched just weeks before the artist’s eighty-eighth birthday this year.
Gibbons, who studied at Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s, is one of a large number of women (in Scotland and more broadly) who achieved significant success and critical acclaim before falling from view only to be ‘rediscovered’ in later life. Except for a posthumous show of works by Joan Eardley (1921–63), Gibbons was the first woman to hold a solo show at Glasgow’s influential Third Eye Centre in 1975. Her work was acquired for major public collections, exhibited in significant survey and group shows and attracted high-profile supporters, including the artist and writer Alasdair Gray, the painter John Bellany, curators and critics (including the Guardian’s Cordelia Oliver), Douglas Hall, Keeper at the National Galleries of Scotland and the Edinburgh gallerists Richard Demarco and Andrew Brown. Yet in spite of a prolific, long-lasting practice, Gibbons’s career became increasingly less prominent as the decades passed. As a result, for those who missed her
far-too-brief moment in the spotlight, she is relatively unknown – an indictment of the curators and historians who have overlooked her. Over the past decade, largely as a result of the championing of a younger generation of artist-admirers, including Stein and Gibbons’s son, the painter Henry Gibbons-Guy, she has built new audiences for her work, exhibiting widely, including a recent solo show at Celine Gallery, Glasgow (15th July–2nd September 2023).
Seeley established 5b with Kirstie Sequitin in 2018 with the idea of publishing works by artists beyond the medium for which they are primarily known: poems by a painter, for example, or the photography of a graphic designer. Based in London, Berlin and now Glasgow, Gibbons was the first artist with whom the duo worked without having had a previous connection. The book is a work of art. It is hardbound in burnt sienna buckram, the artist’s signature debossed in yellow to form the title. The endpapers are dark sea green and the paintings and drawings are reproduced in full detail and colour and given ample space to breathe and vibrate. As a result of decades of critical and curatorial neglect, little print-quality documentation of the artist’s work was available. The first section of the book, dedicated to paintings made between the mid-1960s and 2022, therefore comprises largely works photographed for the book at Gibbons’s Glasgow tenement flat (which doubles as her studio, also documented). The second section, ‘Works on Paper’, is similarly drawn from a career’s worth of works owned by the artist and her son, photographed by 5b. Images of the artist, her studio and assorted ephemera provide context, and two essays are inserted between the texts, one each by Stein and the artist Andrew Cranston, which offer eloquent, enthusiastic routes into thinking about the works. The care, attention and sensitivity with which the book has been produced is wholly evident. After such a long wait, the documentation of these works was crucial and necessary, and is in itself a major achievement. The essays bring earlier critical writing on Gibbons (uncollected and hard to find) up to date, demonstrating her contemporary resonance and relevance. Seeley and Sequitin have aimed to create ‘the book we felt should have been made already: a classic monograph’.2 Carole Gibbons achieves this, and far more.
1 ‘Portfolio: Lucy Stein’, Frieze, 14th February 2016, available at www.frieze.com/article/portfoliolucy-stein, accessed 1st September 2023.