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| Exhibition catalogue published by PWP/Bloomsbury, design by Lucy Morton |
I've been fascinated by Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) ever since I began researching her first husband Eric Ravilious (1903-42). The works I saw here and there seemed dark and strange, not at all like his and not really like anyone else's either. As a writer, her voice runs through the Ravilious in Pictures series I wrote for the Mainstone Press between 2009 and 2012, thanks to her daughter Anne Ullmann kindly sending me snippets of Garwood's autobiography. This was published in 2012 by Fleece Press as Long Live Great Bardfield, and is now in a paperback edition published by Persephone.
I was able to include Garwood alongside Ravilious in my 2018 exhibition In Relation: Nine Couples Who Transformed Modern British Art (see below), which got me thinking about their artistic relationship. Here were two brilliant creative minds that developed together. Ravilious was a youthful twenty-two when they met in 1926, Garwood a mature seventeen. Although he was her teacher, it wasn't long before her influence was felt in his work, for instance in his inclusion of her doll's house as a Lodging House in his Morley College murals (1928-30).
Through the first half of Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, this creative relationship is explored in what I hope is an illuminating way. The second half, though, is all Garwood. It brings together for the first time almost all of her haunting, folk-art-inspired oil paintings and almost every one of her mesmerising collaged house constructions. I can't wait for people to see it!
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 19 November 2024.
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