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Ophelia Gordon Bell
Joan Ophelia Gordon Bell (1915–1975) was an English sculptor, known for her several commissions for the United Kingdom's Atomic Energy Authority.[1] She was born in London on 1 July 1915,[citation needed] the daughter of the painter Winifred Gordon Bell,[1][2] (née Billinge; full name Winifred Joan Ophelia Gordon Bell[3]) and Frederick Lawrence Bell,[3] and was raised in the St John's Wood area.[4] In 1938, her address was listed as 13 Greville Place, London NW6.[5] She studied at Regent Street Polytechnic in the 1930s[2] and exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy, all before the age of 24.[1] She married the landscape artist William Heaton Cooper (1903–1995) in 1940.[1] They lived in Grasmere in the English Lake District, and had two daughters and two sons,[1][6] one of them being the painter Julian Cooper.[7] Both Bell and her husband were followers of the teachings of the Christian Moral Re-Armament movement.[6] The couple held a joint exhibition at the Fine Art Society's London gallery in 1955.[1] Her auction record is £120, set at Anderson & Garland's auction house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 14 July 2015, for her a composition sculpture of a mountaineer.[8] Bell died in Grasmere in 1975 and is buried in the village cemetery.[1] Works Her giant Portland stone figures, 'Thought' and 'Action', are outside the former Atomic Energy Authority offices in Risley, Lancashire.[7] The bronze bust Bell created of mountaineer Edmund Hillary (circa 1953) is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.[1][9] The plaster cast remains in Grasmere.[1] The Catalyst Science Discovery Centre, Widnes, has a relief carving of an anhydrite kiln, made from a piece of anhydrite, for the United Sulphuric Acid Corporation Ltd (an associate company of Fisons Fertilizers Ltd).[10][11] William and Dorothy in 1800, depicts William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. St Oswald's Church, Grasmere has her stone sculpture of the Madonna and child.[1] The Challenge is in the foyer of Stubbins Primary School, in Ramsbottom.[12] The Breakthrough Cross (1966), on the roof of the Lady Chapel at the Church of Christ the Healer at Burrswood Hospital in Groombridge, is made from aluminium and scrap metal.[13] Other works are displayed at the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere,[1] which William Heaton Cooper had inherited from his father, the landscape artist Alfred Heaton Cooper.[14] Formerly at Ambleside, William moved the gallery to Grasmere in 1938. It is now operated by John Cooper, another of Ophelia and William's sons.[14] An exhibition of her work, "A Vital Spirit", is being held at the studio, from May–October 2015.[4][15] LegacyThe Lakes Artists Society, of which Bell was a member from 1940 until her death,[16] grants an annual 'Ophelia Gordon Bell Award' for sculpture "to encourage and reward excellence and innovation".[17] References
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