Molly Macalister was a passionate advocate for sculpture at a time when very little was made or exhibited in New Zealand. A founding member of the New Zealand Society of Sculptors and Associates (1961) and honorary life member from 1979, she was the prime mover behind the 1971 international sculpture symposium in Auckland.
The influence of Wearing’s 1992 Signs that Say can be seen across recent contemporary popular culture and media, particularly social media, wherein a photographic portrait of a stranger holding a handwritten sign in front of them is now a recognized format for truth-telling or confession.
The destruction of spaces and objects central to her method, as well as her poetic, delicate installations, have been hugely influential for process-driven sculptural artists like Simon Starling; artists working with found objects, like Sarah Lucas; and artists refiguring architectural spaces, like Rachel Whiteread.
Lucas seems to have gone from strength-to-strength following her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013 and her triumphant pavilion showing at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. As the first woman to have won the Turner Prize, Whiteread is an important figure for many contemporary female artists especially in having developed a way of working that is not focused on women’s issues or on an explicitly feminist view point.
Emin’s work as part of the Young British Artists movement placed her firmly within a key legacy that was to affect the development of art in Britain for years to come.
Roni Horn played a major role in developing the visual and material language of Minimalism. From the 1980s onwards, she began to create sculptures that picked up on the movement’s interest in materials, yet ventured into Post-Minimalism by emphasizing the centrality of the viewer’s mind and body to the work’s meaning.
Early success allowed Lin to watch perceptions of her work evolve dramatically over the years. Initial resistance to her work gave way to widespread public admiration for pushing the boundaries of what a memorial is. Her impact on other artists has been widespread in all fields, but perhaps most especially in conceptual sculpture and public art.
Elsa Beatrice Kidson became a world leader in the research into magnesium deficiency in apples, and did extensive work on the vitamin C content of fruits, the relationship between calcium deficiency and the disease bitter pit in apples, and the link between mineral constituents and nutritional diseases in tomatoes. Her research was of fundamental significance to horticulture and, especially, to the fruit-growing Nelson region.
Sculptor Mona Hatoum is part of a generation of artists who started to work more commonly across different media in order to best present their intended message.