Ann Christopher

Ann Christopher was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1947 and studied at Harrow School of Art (1965-66) and the West of England College of Art, Bristol (1966-69) under the tutelage of Ralph Brown and Robert Clatworthy.

Christopher undertakes considerable numbers of commissions for private patrons and public organisations and is the recipient of many awards. Recent large commissions include a 3.3 metre bronze for a private house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1998 and a 5.2 metre corten steel sculpture for Crest Nicholson in Portishead in 2000. Her work is in many private and public collections in Britain, Europe and the United States, including the University of Bristol, the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Chantrey Bequest, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and World Wide Business Centres Inc, Philadelphia, and has also been acquired by the Contemporary Art Society.

Elected Royal West of England Academician in 1983 and Royal Academician in 1989, Christopher was made Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1992. She is a sculptor whose abstract works derive from many sources, some of which even she is unable to articulate, but appear as evocations of ancient artefacts and architectural forms. She takes photographs of things that are of current interest to her, such as lines and shadows - a process that allows her to absorb a range of impressions that may be brought to bear in her sculpture. Mass, texture, the thrust of a finely drawn line or a well-worked edge - her work was described by Sir Hugh Casson as a 'sophisticated choice of surface textures interrupted occasionally by a controlled vertical cut or fine-edged aperture'. He also wrote of her 'skilful use of understatement'.

Christopher constructs usually large totemic standing forms, working the texture in plaster or clay before casting in bronze. Christopher has exhibited widely in Britain and lives and works in the West Country.