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Dorset Artist – Carve her name with pride

Nick Churchill on Portland sculptor Joanna Szuwalska

Joanna’s best-known work, the Spirit of Portland – credit Joanne Szuwalska

Her work has become an icon of modern Portland, but outside of the Isle she calls home, her name is largely unknown. Not that it troubles her. She is at best ambivalent about the prospect of wider recognition, although she says she has had to work hard in order to be more readily identified as the creator of ‘The Spirit of Portland’, the landmark sculpture that overlooks Chesil Beach from its lofty perch at Priory Corner.
‘I suppose I was a bit shy about it all really,’ says Joanna Szuwalska, who was born in the port city of Szczecin in north-west Poland but has lived in England for 40 years, the last 24 of them in Dorset. ‘My attitude was that it was a piece that needed doing, it was done and unveiled on 18 August 2000 as part of the millennium celebrations and that was that.
‘But the difficulty in honing your practice to be good at something like large-scale public art is that it’s a very narrow niche. I can’t afford to work without clients because stone is expensive, I don’t have a large space to work in and I’m a single mum. I have to live and keep a roof over our heads.’

Joanna’s ‘Green Man’

It took Joanna three years, part-time, to make ‘The Spirit of Portland’ ‘as a labour of love really’ after her design won a competition to create a contemporary statement that would honour Portland’s past. It shows a mason and a fisherman and is set at the peak of Portland’s commercial prowess when it supported thriving stone and fishing industries with dozens of quarries and a bountiful catch from net, line and pole fishers.
‘Sculpting it was truly hard work as well. It took an hour and half from when I left my home before I was able to start work in a leaky old shed in the corner of a quarry yard. I had to walk there, sign in and then turn the power on. The stoneyard workers laughed a bit at first but eventually they left me to get on with it and at break times they would come and chat to me and I was even able to ask them to model for me.
‘I love that stone. There’s a lot of Portland in it and people from the community. It is very male, but I love that all the women who have spoken to me about it really like it as well. They love their community and this is what their fathers and grandfathers did, their work was the means of them staying on Portland, and the women care about that to this day.
‘It’s a memorial to the life and trades of Portland and a celebration of its people. It has to be a figurative piece, literal and lyrical. Like a photograph, I wanted it to directly express the story. Conceptual art would have been out of step with the specification.’
The Portland stone has weathered beautifully, mellowing into its characteristic warm shades of grey. Its rough edges have worn smooth and ‘The Spirit of Portland’ has relaxed into the landscape it was hewn from as raw material.
Five years after it was unveiled, Joanna gave birth to her daughter. Not long afterwards, she visited Mary Spencer Watson at Dunshay Manor, where the venerable sculptor advised her that for the time being, her primary focus would have to
be on being a mother. ‘I didn’t mind hearing that from Mary, she was quite right. She had seen my work and was very encouraging, inspirational in fact. I felt there was genuine mutual respect.
The fact she liked it was an accolade to me, my little medal.’
If Joanna was to put all her energies into being a mother, it was important that her daughter knew her as mum first and foremost, so although ‘The Spirit of Portland’ was a regular staging post on their many walks, she didn’t feel the need to explain she had made the piece.
‘My daughter was very familiar with that stone and really connected with it as a Portlander – she called them her stony men, but she didn’t know anything about my involvement until a friend told her. She was amazed but, like all kids, basically took it in her stride until years later when people began to doubt her, adults and children alike.
That really upset her. So I set the record straight and made the point to one or two people quite gently by sending cards that give my profession as artist, sculptor, letter cutter and teacher. Since then I’ve made more of an effort to make sure my name is associated with the sculpture. Not only for my daughter’s sake but because as a society, as a community, we should know the names of our artists and strive to make sure others know them as well. ‘The Spirit of Portland’ is public art, but that does not mean the artist shouldn’t be acknowledged.’
Joanna has since been involved with the MEMO Project, which aims to build a visitors’ centre on Portland to raise awareness of biodiversity, both its value and the threats it faces. The project will open in Spring 2020. ‘I’ve been supporting MEMO and did a large relief carving of the now-extinct West African black rhino,’ says Joanna. ‘I made it charitably, but I need to get back into sculpting and do further figurative pieces as well as some more letter cutting. I’ve also got canvasses that are awaiting me, but I can’t make art my only business, I have to do it part-time and make a living teaching – even Mary Spencer Watson was a teacher. I also taught on the prison ship [HMP Weare] when it was in Portland Harbour and was amazed to learn how incredibly creative the people I was teaching were. None of that makes me less of an artist, it just means that new shoes for my daughter take precedence.’