Maggi Hambling was born in Sudbury in 1945. Her family was tight-knit, each member eager to share their experience and passion with others. With her mother, Hambling learned ballroom dancing. With her brother; carpentry. Her father was the one who cultivated her artistic passion. Hambling first studied art under Yvonne Drewry at Amberfield School in Nacton. In 1960 she spent a year studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Lett Haines and Cedric Morris. She subsequently enrolled at the Ipswich School of Art (1962–1964), the Camberwell School of Art (1964–1967) and finally the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art (1967–1969). Hambling also has experience teaching at Wimbledon School of Art.
Despite being a prolific painter, Hambling is best known for her sculptural work, partly due to the regular controversies her public commissions have garnered. Thematically, the artist is inspired by seascapes, particularly those of the North Sea, a theme that has generated its own series of paintings. Portraits, both living and posthumous, constitute the other main sub-group of works in her corpus. Through portraiture, the artist believes that a unique form of remembrance, and thus grief, can be achieved. A self-described feminist and deeply concerned and involved in social issues, she features women from both the private and public spheres predominantly in her work.
Hambling’s career has been punctuated by public sculptures that have shed their fair share of ink. A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, unveiled in 1998, was the first to stir up public opinion. The figure, depicted smoking, emerges from a granite coffin intended to be used as a public bench, allowing the public to engage in the titled ‘conversation’. Critics were harsh, claiming the artwork was a selfish expression of self on the artist’s behalf, but the public rapidly adopted the sculpture. It was nonetheless the most vandalised sculpture in London’s public space, the cigarette being regularly stolen or broken. It had now been indefinitely removed.
Scallop, a stainless-steel seashell from 2003, is a homage to Benjamin Britten, standing on the beach of Hambling’s native Suffolk. Its reception was lukewarm, with local residents lamenting that it ‘spoilt’ a pristine section of public beach. A petition was launched for its removal, and it has been repeatedly vandalised since its installation.
Hambling’s latest project is perhaps the most sensitive. In November 2020, she unveiled A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, a sculpture celebrating the feminist icon in Newington Green, north London. The location is historically associated with the emergence of feminism in the UK. However, feminist writers and figures did not welcome the sculpture in question. Wollstonecraft, represented as a small-scale nude-silver figure, was criticised for its underwhelming scale and idealised nudity, which was seen as doing a disservice to the cause it sought to embody. Hambling defended her aesthetic choices by stating that the sculpture was a response to traditional male heroic statuary that feature a plethora of ‘schlongs’, from the Elgin marbles to Michelangelo’s David. For Hambling, clothes are deterministic and therefore restrictive and would have failed to capture Wollstonecraft’s spirit and her struggle for women’s rights.
Although mainly influential in the UK, Hambling has enjoyed some international success, best exemplified through a selection of her exhibitions: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA (1991), The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia (2013), and, most recently, two important retrospectives at both CAFA Art Museum, Beijing and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2019).
She was awarded a CBE in 2010.
