Creative Connections Coventry

Taiwo Owatemi (born 1992) - Politician

Taiwo Owatemi has been the Member of Parliament for Coventry North West since 2019.

She was raised in London, but had close links to her aunt and cousins in Coventry. Her father died when she was six and she was brought up with her siblings by her mother, a nurse. Owatemi is a qualified pharmacist and worked at a cancer unit in the NHS before she entered Parliament. She was selected for a parliamentary internship by the Social Mobility Foundation and gained experience working for the government. A member of the Labour Party, Owatemi has been Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities since 2021.

The exhibition connects collections through these famous sitters. For example Graham Sutherland’s Trial Piece for the tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, owned by the Herbert, is displayed here next the National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of Basil Spence, who is shown seated in front of the tapestry. Next to this is a portrait of Graham Sutherland himself, also from the collection.

Coventry

This work is made by using a map of Coventry from 1945 and a score of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. The sculpture has been burnt in accordance with damage depicted on maps that showed the damaged areas of the city in the Second World War. On 14 November 1940 the city centre, including the medieval Cathedral, was largely destroyed during a wave of high explosive bombs and incendiary bombs.

A new Cathedral was constructed next to the ruins. It was inaugurated by the performance of a specially commissioned choral work, War Requiem, by Britten in 1962. Pages from the score of War Requiem form the walls in Coventry. The piece draws on nine poems by First World War poet Wilfred Owen and the text of these poems has been written into the street network of wartime Coventry. The text of the Latin mass forms the outside circumference of the sculpture.

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) - Artist

Graham Sutherland was commissioned to design the Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph tapestry in the new Coventry Cathedral.

He began painting in 1931, producing a wide range of work, including portraits, landscapes, industrial scenes, book illustrations, commercial posters and textile designs.

In 1946 he painted a Crucifixion scene for the transept of St Matthew's Church in Northampton. It was Basil Spence’s admiration for this painting which led him to commission Sutherland for the Coventry Cathedral tapestry.

The tapestry, measuring 22 metres high and 11 metres wide, arrived in Coventry on 1 March 1962 and it took a month to hang it correctly.

John Piper (1903-1992) - Painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows

As an official War Artist, John Piper recorded the destruction of Coventry Cathedral the morning after the Coventry Blitz. He was commissioned by Basil Spence to design the stained glass baptistry window for the new Coventry Cathedral.

In the 1930s John Piper was one of the leading abstract painters in Britain. This drawing shows him seated in front of Forms on Dark Blue (1936), one of his largest and most important works of the period.

From 1950 Piper began working in stained glass in partnership with Patrick Reyntiens. For the Cathedral baptistry window they produced an abstract design on a vast scale, with 195 lights of stained glass in primary colours. Piper’s painting Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940 is displayed in the Peace and Reconciliation Gallery at the Herbert.

Graham Sutherland worked on the design for the Coventry Cathedral tapestry for several years before a final version was agreed. He recommended the French weavers Pinton Frères to make the tapestry. This company had a 12-metre-wide loom and was one of the few companies in the world that could weave the tapestry in one piece.

A photographic enlargement of Sutherland’s final design was produced which the weavers used as a pattern. In early 1959 Pinton Frères produced this trial piece of the Eagle of St John. As a result of studying the enlarged photographs and the trial piece Sutherland felt that some aspects of his design were not translating successfully from painting to weaving, and he made some further changes to the design.

Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928) - Actor

Ellen Terry was born in Coventry to a family of actors who were on tour in Coventry at the time of her birth.

She was the leading actor of her day. She was a great Shakespearian and comic actor and popularised playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. She performed her most memorable roles under the management of Henry Irving with whom she undertook tours of theatres in the UK and toured America seven times. In later life, she continued to act but also produced plays, lectured and wrote.

This painting by John Singer Sargent was made for reproduction in Terry's golden jubilee programme of 12 June 1906.

Vanley Burke (born 1951) - Photographer

In 2001, Vanley Burke was commissioned by the Herbert to produce a series of photographs of people and places in Coventry. A selection is shown here.

Born in Jamaica in 1951, Vanley Burke moved to the UK in 1965 to join his family in Handsworth in Birmingham. He brought with him a ‘Box Brownie’ camera that he had been given for his 10th birthday. His first studio was in Handsworth and his photographs capture the experiences of the African Caribbean community in Britain. Burke’s work reflects the everyday social, economic and cultural lives of Black people and aims to counteract negative perceptions or stereotypical imagery of Black people found in mainstream media.

This portrait is by photographer and artist Pogus Caesar. During the 1980s, Caesar was Director of the West Midlands Minority Arts Service and in 1985 both he and Burke photographed the Handsworth Riots.

These photographs were taken in Coventry in 2001 when Vanley Burke was commissioned by the Herbert to capture images of people and places in the city. The names of the subjects were not recorded but together they form an intimate ‘snapshot’ portrait of the community at that time. If you know or recognise anyone in these photographs, we would love to know.

Mo Mowlam (1949-2005) - Politician

Mo Mowlam grew up in Coventry and attended Coundon Court School and joined the Labour Party in her first year at Durham University. She was Member of Parliament for Redcar from 1987 to 2001 and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. She played an important role in orchestrating the Good Friday Peace Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, effectively ending the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. The following year she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Coventry.

Mowlam was a popular politician and known for her charisma and plain speaking. This painting was originally planned as a group portrait commemorating the Northern Ireland Peace Negotiations but ended up as a portrait of Mowlam on her own. After her death, Tony Blair described her as 'one of the shrewdest political minds I ever encountered'.

George Eliot (1819-1880) - Writer

George Eliot spent much of her life in Coventry and Nuneaton. Her best-known work, Middlemarch, is said to be partly based on her experiences of living in Foleshill as a young woman in the 1840s.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Her novels explore rural provincial life, and include The Mill on the Floss (1860), Romola (1862-3) and Middlemarch (1871-2). She challenged Victorian social conventions by living for many years with the writer and critic George Henry Lewes, who was separated, but not divorced from his wife. 

Visiting Geneva in 1850, she sat for two portraits by the Swiss artist François D'Albert Durade, one of which is shown here. The postcard is an 1881 reproduction of a photograph taken in 1858. She described it to her publisher as ‘not thoroughly satisfactory.'

Lisa Gunn (born 1975) - Artist

Lisa Gunn was born in Coventry, and continues to live and work in the city, exhibiting nationally and internationally.

While studying fine art at Coventry University in 1997, Lisa Gunn was partially paralysed in a road accident. She went on to develop work which challenges society’s beliefs and ideas about disability. Although the work shown here is a self-portrait, Gunn has given it the title Victoria. This is a reference to the restrictions imposed on women in the Victorian period, symbolised by the corset she is wearing, and also to the victory or empowerment she has achieved through her art.