Love set in stone

07/02/1998

The sculptress Josefina de Vasconcellos has a profound faith which inspires both her art and her innovative work with disadvantaged children. This profile is by a freelance journalist who went to meet her in her Lake District studio. A war memorial was erected in Aldershot in 1950: it was a tall, commanding stone statue of Christ calming the troubled waters of the world. Last year, vandals ruined its head, so the authorities began a search for somebody capable of repairing it. To their astonishment, they discovered that its original creator was not only still alive but still hard at work.

Josefina de Vasconcellos has taken on the task of recreating her statue, but the new figure will be different. I think that whoever damaged it might have thought it rather stern, she says, and they are right. Christ should, and will, have a gentler expression. I?m getting there: it?s a bit like the Cheshire Cat at the moment, you can only see the smile.

To find that explanation touching but na?ve would be to underestimate its author. She knows about mindless vandalism ? it was hooligan behaviour that, a year ago, forced her out of her Lakeland cottage ? but she also knows all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, which has been, in a way, her life?s work.

She is the only child of a Brazilian diplomat and his English wife. When she was 21, she exhibited a bronze group, called The Repentance of St Hubert, at the Royal Academy; she showed her work there for another 40 years. Every Christmas, one of her Nativities ? she has done four for the purpose ? can be seen behind the tree in Trafalgar Square. She has made many portrait busts, of her friend Beatrix Potter, of Lord Denning, Sir Edmund Hillary, of poets and pianists, priests and politicians: she is presently working on a head of Richard Branson.

The widow of the painter Delmar Bonner, she also paints and writes poetry, but it is her inventive and accessible sculpture that is her glory. It may be seen in quiet rural settings, in churches and cathedrals, in royal collections and in the Peace Park in Hiroshima ? and she is the only living sculptor with a statue in St Paul?s Cathedral: Ah yes, that one. It looks like terracotta but it?s much stronger stuff, used for casting railway engine wheels ? difficult to use but very satisfactory. It?s a simple Mother and Child: Mary has no shoes and is dressed like a country girl.

She lives now in the Cumbrian town of Kendal. Oddfellows Gallery occupies Bonnie Prince Charlie?s House in Stricklandgate; it is a light, lovely building that was already old when the prince spent a night there. Near the back door is a sheltered patio, where the Aldershot stone head is waiting for further attention. And right at the top of the house, in a warm and tiny flat, lives Josefina: quite literally a sculptor-in-residence.

I called on her five days before the opening of a new gallery, just down the street, which is to be devoted entirely to her work. I?m very lucky, she chuckled, usually you have to have been dead for a considerable time for that to happen. She is tiny, and rather stooped; she finds it impossible to sleep lying down so there is no bed in the flat, only a comfortable sofa on which she catnaps, amidst her work. When she came to the door, she apologised for looking a mess but she had been busy doing this ? and she waved towards the beginnings of a dramatic, falling plaster figure, attached to a bow of iron: I?m absolutely mad to have started it a week before the exhibition ? but if it?s not finished, well, I shall just show it in progress.

There is a story behind the figure. One freezing winter?s night during the Second World War, she was having an early supper at her cottage in Little Langdale, listening anxiously for the sound of RAF planes returning to their base at Barrow-in-Furness. She knew that the mountains were dangerously high for damaged aircraft to cross ? indeed, she had already found a jacket on the fells which had been blown right off an airman, and once, terrifyingly, she had come across a man?s hand. But that night there was an enormous explosion. A plane had crashed over the fell at the head of our valley: the boys had baled out, but they?d been blown against the rock face, among the icicles and the snow. They hung there in their parachutes for five days. Eventually brave shepherds risked their lives to get them down. She pauses, sadly. Dead? Oh, yes. Killed instantly, I should think. Now, more than 50 years on, she has started work on their memorial.

She also won an MBE for her work with disadvantaged children. One summer day she was chipping away at a large stone to be called The Last Chimera ? it?s in Edinburgh now, in the garden of the Queen?s church, Cripplegate ? when some boys appeared with their master. They were sunburned and lively, wanting to know what I was doing. And I showed them and gave them lemonade and said how nice they were, and the master asked if he could bring another lot next week. And when the second lot came, he said that they were all on remand and did I mind ? and I didn?t at all. And that?s how my love affair with approved schools began.

After that first meeting ? Josefina is frankly dyslexic with dates and it?s hard to unravel the sequence ? she was asked if she could help to found an Outward Bound school for these boys. At Ulpha, in Cumberland, we found this marvellous ruin ? a small farmstead with a tree growing out of it and its own glebe and its little bit of river. The National Trust let me have it for ?21 a year and we camped there and little by little we built it up, the boys and their officers all together, cooking and clowning and building together. It was an enormous success, and in the end it was cheaper to stay in than a youth hostel.

She loved those boys, many of whom still come to visit her. It was wonderful to see them getting out of their difficulties. Of course some never did: they?d been too brutally used when they were little, and then can you ever recover happiness? Or what we would call goodness? But most of them did.

One day, her naughty boys came across a group of disabled children in wheelchairs who longed to get up the mountains. We?ll take them! they said, and off they went carrying them, taking them up the fells and over the lakes and, afterwards, cooking them supper in their farmhouse. So the next thing was that I was asked to make a holiday place for these children. By then, building was more expensive and difficult, but the port of Fleetwood wasn?t doing very well, and I had the idea that I might get a ship cheaper than a building.

Thus began the second life of the trawler Harriet, raised on to dry land and converted into a play-centre for disabled children at Millom on the coast, where part of the Armada was shipwrecked and people, says Josefina, still have a Spanish look. And in other ways she has used her creativity to help disadvantaged people, making swings and carts in which handicapped children could experience the thrill of speed, and a huge carpet with various raised and tactile sections on which blind children could safely and happily dance, knowing where they were by the sensation on their toes.

Josefina is a profoundly spiritual woman, who sees no demarcation between religion and the rest of existence: The whole of life is religious to me. At 93, she says, it is hard work just keeping alive, but when she settles down to her sculpture, she can work all day, and I am so grateful for that. Though the rest of her body is frail, her hands are large, beautiful and strong, seeming almost to have an independent life.

As we left her flat to visit the new gallery, she wondered which would be her favourite piece of sculpture in the world. After much thought, she settled on Rodin?s The Return of the Prodigal (she had lessons, incidentally, from a pupil of Rodin?s). Of her own work, she was fondest of a crucifix she called Father, forgive. It is enormous, made on the slant and showing the moment when Christ?s feet had been nailed but his arms, as yet, merely roped. On his face, you can see the conflict between his prayer for forgiveness and his longing for it not to happen. The crucifix went to a monastery, said Josefina, but the monks couldn?t bear it; then it was left where children could play with it, and they called it just The Man. They climbed on it and covered it with blankets and offered it sandwiches. I was very glad.

Now, it is in the grounds of Rydal Hall, a diocesan conference centre near Wordsworth?s house. I went there after leaving Josefina and saw, first, her largest work, a seven-ton stone representation of mankind escaping the evils of the world ? what Josefina calls, with typical dismissiveness, a goody-baddy thing. And then, suddenly, there was that anguished, slanting figure of Christ, straining up from the bonds of the cross and looking, unforgettably, stricken and sad.

When she was very young, Josefina was taken to the British Museum, where she first encountered early Chinese stone-carving. She still loves it: It has always been my ideal: it is large and simple, and yet the detail is done with precision and generosity. She may well be quite unaware that her own powerful, contemplative work deserves the very same praise.