It is with great sadness that we have to tell you of the death, aged eighty-two, on Monday 25 October 2021, of the sculptor and long standing NCAS and Norwich 20 Group member, Ros Newman.
In the loving care of her daughter, Delphi, Ros had been physically ailing for some time, though her mind remained sharp as a tack.
We cannot think of a better tribute to Ros than these lines borrowed from past NCAS Chair, Keith Roberts', essay in the catalogue of Ros's solo retrospective exhibition at the Fairhurst Gallery two years ago.
Artists who model in plaster or clay frequently start out by making an initial metal framework, or armature, to act as the support for the modelling material. Ros Newman, ever since developing her unusual oxy-acetylene welding technique in the early sixties, turned this practice on its head, by transforming the welded steel armature itself into the airy, delicate, figurative works that are her instantly recognizable trademark. As she has said, “I found that I could use steel as a modelling material . . . steel found me, and I embraced her with all my passion”. Her method stands in sharp contrast to the (more macho?) ways that iron and steel are more conventionally used; the heavy cast figures of Anthony Gormley, or the static welded steel of Anthony Caro. Currently, one of the very few affinities with her practice can be found in the lively, figurative work of local artist Rachael Long.
She came from a remarkable, artistic family. Her mother went to the Royal College of Art (RCA) and her father, a scientist, co-invented the Altair Design geometric colouring books. They in turn were both from artistic families. Her maternal grandfather was Sir William Rothenstein, painter and principal of the RCA from 1920 to 1935, her uncle, Sir John Rothenstein, was Tate director from 1938 to 1964 and wrote Modern English Painters while her uncle Michael was a noted print maker. This all raises that perennially interesting question of whether artistic talent is in some part familial or whether it is simply socially inherited.
Following her somewhat unconventional early education Ros spent a short time at Chelsea Art School in 1955, but then took various jobs before finally landing up at Hammersmith College of Art as a mature student in the early sixties. It was here that she discovered, became entranced by, and subsequently developed, her own technique of oxyacetylene welding that would become central to her way of working. One of the oldest forms of welding, and rarely used today in an industrial context, oxyacetylene welding uses a very high temperature flame to melt the iron or steel, while a rod can be used to add a new molten pool of metal to the growing work.
Ros used her skeletal skeins of steel to create over the years a joyful menagerie of animated people, animals and birds. Minimalist chickens, cockerels, starlings, and seagulls whirl around with the harlequins, dancers and acrobats all surveyed by lively horses and cheetahs, all seemingly in perpetual motion. Hers is physically tough work but made harder by the fact that she had to adapt her manual processes after breaking both wrists in a motorcycle accident in Taiwan. Her earlier work was made largely in mild steel, which could be polished, galvanized or even plated in nickel or tin, and many of these works were of necessity essentially domestic. Later, and as public-art projects came along, she embraced stainless steel, including welding together worked forms that had been laser-cut from sheet metal. In much of this she was helped by Chris, her late husband, an engineer turned sculptor.
An early example is Bird Flight, commissioned as the result of an intense selection process by the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society and paid for with money from public subscriptions and a raffle of the maquette. For this major new work, she used multiple cutout steel doves that swirl upwards from a quiet pool in the friend’s garden in front of the Oncology Department at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. It was installed on a bright and blustery day in June 2005. Many related works since used this basic motif, including Birds in the Wave Garden at Pensthorpe in 2010, Seagulls at St. George’s Park in Great Yarmouth (2008) and Freedom Fighters at Salthouse in 2006 and numerous private commissions. She was represented for many years by the Alwin Gallery in London (later the Alwin Sculpture Gallery, Kent) following her first solo show with them in 1971.
