Barbara Tribe was born in Sydney in 1913, studying sculpture at East Sydney Technical College. In 1935 she became the first woman and first sculptor to receive the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship, using it to come to England to attend the Royal Academy School and the City & Guilds School of Art. Although predominantly known for her figurative and portrait sculptures, in the 1950s–1960s she also experimented with ceramics and paintings in gouache and watercolour.
Sculptor Barbara Tribe was born in the Sidney suburb of Edgecliff, Australia in 1913, the daughter of a recently arrived English immigrant and his South African wife. At the age of 15 she enrolled at the East Sydney Technical College, where she was taught by Art Deco sculptor George Rayner Hoff, an English émigré and former Royal Academy exhibitor.
After graduating with honours in 1933, Tribe became the first woman and first sculptor to receive the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship, which she used to travel to England in 1935, at the age of 22. She settled in Earl's Court, near South Kensington, home to a community of Australian expats including fellow sculptor Ola Cohn. Upon Hoff's recommendation, Tribe also enrolled at the Royal Academy School, and additionally at the City & Guilds School of Art in Kennington. Her command of the human form, expressed in a pair of bronzes, Lovers I and Lovers II , was admired by the Bloomsbury painter and teacher Duncan Grant. In her free time she visited London’s galleries and museums, where she discovered original works by sculptors including Rodin, Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi, and Jacob Epstein. After her scholarship came to an end, feeling that she still had much to learn, she decided to remain in Britain and spent three months modelling portrait heads for customers at Selfridges department store to earn a living. During the Second World War, she mainly lived in Kensington, where she had a studio, but from 1941, following the intense bombardment of London, she developed a perforated eardrum and from then on, suffered from increasing deafness in one ear, though she never allowed this to thwart her ambition. She was employed by the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments to record historic buildings vulnerable to wartime damage and in 1943 Australia House sent seven Australian airmen to pose for their busts in her studio. In 1947 her sculpture Jarrah Maid was included by critic Eric Newton in his monograph British Sculpture 1944–1946.
In the late 1940s Tribe moved to Cornwall, setting up a home and studio in Sheffield with her husband, architect and potter John Singleman. They led a simple yet sociable life, developing strong friendships within the artistic community. She taught sculpture at Penzance School of Art, a position she held for 40 years. Her awareness of the plants and wildlife of Cornwall would inform her considerable sculptural output in a range of materials from marble and bronze to wood and terracotta, as well as in drawings and prints. During the early 1950s she was briefly influenced by Barbara Hepworth, but this modernist phase was short-lived. The theme of organic growth – the core of her creativity – found expression in sketches and models of the farm animals and plant forms around her. She became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, and also the St Ives and Penwith societies. It was at this time, that she experimented with modelling in clay, also developing her skill in wood carving, which she had studied earlier in London. In 1951 her Figure, carved from mountain ash, was shown at the Royal Academy. Two years later, she was elected as a member of the Society of Portrait Sculptors, and soon afterwards also became a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Towards the end of the decade, she embarked on a series of vibrant flower paintings and bold abstracts in gouache and watercolour. After her husband died in 1961, she focused on ceramics, creating nearly 100 pieces. She travelled extensively in Thailand, India, Japan and Indonesia, whose artistic heritage enriched her work. She also returned to Australia on numerous occasions, studying the art and culture of the aboriginal peoples. In 1979 Barbara’s first retrospective took place at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. In the same year, she produced the magnificent Fertility Goddess inspired by Neolithic pottery of the Middle East. Despite her advancing years, she continued to exhibit throughout the 1990s, both in the UK and Australia. In 1998 she was awarded the prestigious Jean Masson Davidson Medal, an international award from the Society of Portrait Sculptors ‘for distinguished services and outstanding achievement in portrait sculpture’. The catalogue of her 1991 retrospective the Mall Galleries in London described her as 'Australia's most important living sculptress'. She died in Penzance, England in 2000. Her work is represented in a number of UK public collections including the Royal Cornwall Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Barbara Tribe]
Publications related to [Barbara Tribe] in the Ben Uri Library