Sleep in Sculpture: Babies from the Bowes (No. 13)

Description

Sleep is an interesting subject for sculpture. Sculpture is always still, but we read life into it. Focusing on sculptures of infants in repose, on loan at the Henry Moore Institute from the Bowes collection, three writers ask: are these babies about to waken from their slumbers, or are these little tableaux memorials to lives that were all too brief?

Betwixt-and-Between
Fiona Russell

Fair images of Sleep
Alison Yarrington

Sleep and Sculpture
Briony Fer

This essay was written to accompany the exhibition Sleep in Sculpture: Babies from the Bowes (3 May - 27 July 1996, Gallery 4).