Ursula Fookes
England, b.1906, d.1991
Built-up Town
- c. 1932
- Linocut
- Presented by Mr Rex Nan Kivell, 1953
- 268 x 335mm
- 94/138
Location: Arcade
Tags: blue (color), buildings (structures), hills, houses, patterns (design elements), railroads (infrastructure), smoke (material), tunnels
Crammed with rows of housing and with a rail tunnel disappearing beneath it, Ursula Fookes’s Built-up Town displays the connection between the commuter zones and expanding railway networks of the early twentieth-century. It is a feature of modernity well suited to such expressive depiction in linocut. Although active at the heart of the linocut printmaking revival in early 1930s Britain, Ursula Fookes gave up her life as a painter and printmaker after entering the Women’s Voluntary Service in World War II, where she ran mobile canteens for troops in Belgium, Holland and Germany.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Exhibition History
In Built-up Town Ursula Fookes effectively shows the spread of the urban environment. Rows of housing, two tall chimney stacks and a railway leading into a tunnel are dramatic symbols of modern life encroaching upon the rural landscape and drastically altering it. It is likely that Fookes attended the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and studied linocuts under Claude Flight. She exhibited in the annual British Linocut exhibitions at the Redfern and Ward Galleries and also showed her work with the Society of Women Artists. (Label date unknown)