Discover the work of Edwina Sandys, the British artist who moved from London to New York almost fifty years ago

   Mascara, sculpture, 1975

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST October 11, 2025

   The work of Edwina Sandys, the British artist who moved from London to New York almost fifty years ago, is both strong and distinctive, being executed with graphic wit and sometimes an erotic subtext. It was brought very much to the attention of New York a few years after her arrival when Christa, her bronze sculpture of a naked woman crucified, was hung in the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Sandys made it clear that she wasn’t just hitching a ride on the cresting wave of feminism but messaging that the power of a universally known image of human suffering should be channeled to include female abuse. Nonetheless a battle erupted between two hefty clerics during which Christa was taken down. The piece was soon reinstalled though and is up there there still.

   So when did the young Edwina Sandys decide upon a life making art? “Grandpapa was the only artist I knew growing up,” she says. Winston Churchill, her grandfather, is embedded in history as a statesman and the architect of victory in World War II, but  he was also an accomplished painter. That though was not the motivating factor for her. ”I loved watching him paint. But I wasn’t immediately doing it,” Sandys says. “We did art at school. And I was good at it.”

   Had any artists of the time impressed her? Such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland, then the totemic figures of the London artworld? No. ”It was more myself,” Sandys says. “The main thing is I love to draw. I would draw people. Then I would put the colors in the background or the foreground. But I wasn’t a painter as much as a drawer.”

Literary Horse

   Who was she drawing?  “Real people,” Sandys said. Such as her nanny. “Nanny Buckle was very important in my life,” she says. Also close friends, like Ann-Marie McDougal. “Whenever I had pen and paper I would sketch her in black and white,” Sandys said. “Then I put on color. And the color tells me more about the person.”

   With what tool did she draw? And do her deft lines sometimes go askew?  “A felt pen, a magic marker.” Sandys said. “I usually get it right the first time. The line is strong, it’s not fiddled around.”

   We then walked around Sandys’ drawing, painting and sculpture-filled studio, where the work thrums with two vibes which are rather rare in the art world, being both witty and sometimes slyly erotic, without being porny. Here I see Sandys’ drawings, her illustrated books, a bronze replica of Christa, and a number of painted portraits, including ones of  Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, who introduced the 19^th century world to the convulsive concept of evolution, and one of her grandfather, showing him at work on one of his actual paintings, Bottlescape,. These portraits have Sandys’ inventive backgrounds, the painted images of relevant books. Shakespeare’s books, for instance, include the Bible and Aesop’s Fables.

Hands on, 1990, sculpture
 

   Here too are Sandys’s sculptures. Her drawings, her paintings have an instantly recognizable look but strikingly her sculptures can be wholly unalike in the way they have been configured. These differences though don’t indicate that they were made in different periods, as with Picassoid styles. Rather they reflect her specific intentions with each piece or, indeed, her different moods,

   Here, for instance, are several images of poodles sculpted out of thin slices of aluminum painted white and sandwiched together. What was in Sandys’ head when she made that piece? “it’s like drawing,” she said. ”It’s to do with my drawing and my cut outs”. Such pieces are flat as drawing paper but there are works in marble which have been  carved into solid minimalist chunks.  Such as Equus, a solidly executed carving, which references a horse’s head.  “This one has strong lines.,” Sandys said. “Obviously I was in the mood for square stuff.”

  Two striking and larger than human lifesize bronzes standing in a corner of the workspace show a banana looking down on a pear. “They are having a conversation”, Sandys told me. I noted that it had a suggestively sexual look to me,  “Yes, it does, It’s a get-together,” she agreed. The dig in the ribs title of the piece is Flirtation.

The Bard, 2021

   Sandys makes her pieces in clay, and they are then cast in bronze or carved in marble. Elements such as faces, hands and bosoms usually are figurative but are they are  frequently reassembled to create her own reality. I remarked upon the sculpture of a woman with a fish on her head and a cavity in the chest. Sandys pointed downwards.  “And that’s the fish’s tail,” she observed.

   Why the oblong cavity where the breasts should be?

  “That’s because it’s an important part of the body,” Sandys said. ”And sometimes what you don’t see is what’s important. And that is what I do. The things that you don’t see, that is what I want you to think about.”

Defiance, 1975

   An overheard telephone call indicated that Sandys was working on a new piece. I asked about it.
  “I’m doing a  sculpture of a person,” she said. “I’m building it up. But I’m not putting all the body in.”

   Why not?

   “Because it’s not so interesting, I think,” Sandys said. “I’ve got her face and her arms. And what I like is one of her arms is putting on her mascara.  It’s a delicate operation when you put your make-up. on. Both of your arms are involved, it’s all arms and hands, nothing to do with the body.”

   It is clearly going to be a worthy addition to the remarkable and underknown oeuvre of Edwina Sandys. WM