A remarkable gallery and studio in Banbridge houses the striking work of local-born sculptor FE McWilliam, who moved with, and took influence from, the great artists of the early 20th century

HIDDEN BETWEEN two roundabouts just a couple of minutes’ drive from the busy main Dublin to Belfast road, stands a magical garden, gallery and studio, where some of the finest sculptures in the country are on display.

“The trick is not to go away from this world, but to make something just a little bit different,” sculptor FE McWilliam once wrote. “That’s where the mystery comes in.”

There’s a dim roar from the traffic beyond the high wooden fence, but you hardly notice it in this brilliant little place, which also has a Tardis-like gallery for visiting exhibitions, currently housing a fine show of recent work by Co Antrim-born Basil Blackshaw.

The FE McWilliam Gallery and Studio was set up in 2008, 20 years after the sculptor’s death, to house works his family bequeathed to the people of Banbridge, including the contents of his studio, a replica of which sits at the back of the garden. McWilliam, son of a local doctor, was born in the town in 1909 and his work spans most of the major artistic movements of the 20th century, while not entirely belonging to any of them.

The first big piece you see inside the gallery is Umbilicus. This is a tall, womanly pair of crossed legs, cast in bronze, tapering into a round belly with a navel like an eye. The piece has, says heritage officer Jason Diamond, a controversial history. “The NI Sports Council asked the NI Arts Council in 1977 to commission a piece,” he says. “But when they saw Umbilicus, they were appalled, and said it had nothing to do with sport and could well be seen as detrimental to women.”

The Arts Council took it and asked McWilliam to come up with something else. He came back with the Judo Players, but by this time the Sports Council had been disbanded.

Legs and feet, and in particular female legs and feet, were a favourite subject. The at once imposing and insouciant Legs Static is in the garden at Banbridge, and the studio has maquettes of pieces including Girl in a Cloth Cap – a pair of long legs seated on the ground, wearing a cloth cap.

A photograph in the gallery’s cafe shows the sculptor working in his studio, surrounded by photographs from advertisements for tights. The cafe, run by local company Quails, has glass walls and a terrace so you can admire the sculptures and the garden while having good coffee and food.

Judo Players, a wonderful piece full of energy and movement, was rejected by several of the North’s local authorities. It was finally bought by Derry City Council and was displayed for a time until someone stole a hand, after which it was put into storage. Earlier this year, it was spotted by a member of the public in a council yard beside the city dump. The council has since said it plans to restore the sculpture and give it a new home. It will soon go on display in the Banbridge gallery.

Derry has one of McWilliam’s most magnificent and important works, the statue of Princess Macha, outside the Altnagelvin Hospital. McWilliam was commissioned by the hospital’s architects Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall. The dove on Macha’s outstretched arm recalls St Colmcille but also Picasso. When it was put up in 1961, Macha’s modernism caused an outcry, as did an accompanying mural by William Scott, but McWilliam calmly responded that people would “get used to it”. It is now much-loved.

“He had a good sense of humour,” says Diamond. “When he heard that Homer was to go to Belfast’s City Hospital, he called it ‘man with his arm in a sling’. When it snows, it really looks like that.” Homer is on loan to Banbridge.

McWilliam considered himself lucky to have grown up in a country town, with fields that were blue when the flax was in flower, white when the locally made linen was laid out to bleach – “magical intrusions in the normal patchwork of green”.

With mills, butchers and furniture makers, there was the “constant sight of craftsmanship”. However, he also witnessed the riots and house burnings of 1920, and wanted out. After studying art in Belfast, he headed for the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1928, intending to be a painter. There he met Henry Moore, who became a lifelong friend and influenced his decision to become a sculptor.

In 1931 he took off with his future wife, the artist Beth Crowther, for Paris, “holy ground, full of the memories of Cezanne, and the presence of Picasso”. Brancusi was a mentor, with his ideal of beauty as “absolute equity”. McWilliam was also drawn to surrealism, because it “made for freedom of thinking”. It appealed to his playfulness – his torso-less figures, one of them on display at Banbridge, recall Dalí. In Paris he also read Ulysses, appreciating how Joyce had built “complexity . . . on a simple framework”. He served in the RAF during the second World War, and spent time in India. That country’s sculptures would prove a significant influence.

He and Beth and their two daughters lived in London, where their circle included Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Elisabeth Frink. Terence Flanagan was also a friend and his wife, Shelagh, was McWilliam’s Irish agent. The studio has busts of the couple.

Another friend, the artist and biographer Roland Penrose, described parties in the garden where the sculptures seemed to join in the conversation.

The Banbridge gallery has one of McWilliam’s powerful Women of Belfast series, inspired by the IRA bombing of the Abercorn café in Belfast in 1972. These bronzes show women flung backwards by the force of the explosion, their clothes stripping away, their faces draped. Diamond says they have to explain to children what the sculptures depict, but also says that surgeons and nurses visiting the gallery have commented that he has captured well the impact of a bomb on the human body. McWilliam wrote that “representation can lead one into complexities of design”.

Although he never returned to live in Northern Ireland, it influenced his work. “Having been born in Ulster, near the Border, in a town half Catholic, half Protestant, brought up during the ‘trouble’, this may account for a special awareness I have of the antithesis in life, and the necessity to find some reflection of this in art,” he wrote. “Good and evil, male and female, romantic and classical, solid and void.”

Not all of McWilliam’s experiments worked. He was cheerful about this – believing that there was no virtue in never getting out of your depth.

Curator Riann Coulter thinks McWilliam will be favourably re-assessed in the light of a magnificent new book on his work by Denise Ferran and Valerie Holman, published by Ashgate. “He’s been a bit ignored in Ireland,” she says. “People who come here are constantly surprised by the quality of his work.”

The FE McWilliam Gallery Studio is at 200 Newry Road, Banbridge, Co Down. femcwilliam.com