If the artist had been born earlier they would have been lauded as a primitive. Later, and they would have been a leading light in the BritArt movement.

But they weren’t.

Instead they created their art in a vacuum of obscurity. Not because the art was wrong but because the time was wrong. And so was their gender. Back then women didn’t create art. And art had a presented style.

Her simplistic forms and faux-naif interpretations of the natural world were based on an emotion and personal experience – foolish feminine attributes that a real artist would scorn.

She knew this yet she continued to make her art wherever and whenever she could. Most survives in the form of small clay models but the few examples of her larger sculptures show that these were doodles – a textured way of thinking and feeling her way to the finished piece.

Giraffe is one example. This small orange piece is the precursor to the towering 30 feet high copper statue – almost identical in every detail.