Mary Fedden

Mary Fedden (1915-2012) left school at sixteen to study at the Slade School of Art, where she met her eventual husband, Julian Trevelian. She studied under the theatre designer Vladimir Polunin, who’d worked with the Ballets Russes. Fedden graduated in 1936 but the beginning of her artistic career was forestalled by the outbreak of the Second World War. She volunteered as a Land Girl, hoping to be sent to the country far away from the bombings, but instead ended up at a farm in Gloucestershire next door to the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Filton, which was a major target of the Luftwaffe.

Later in the war she moved to London and worked as a set painter for the Arts Theatre and as a mural artist painting propaganda for the Ministry of War. In 1944 Fedden was called up and sent abroad to work as a driver for the assistant head of the Naafi in Europe. She returned to London two years later and took up painting again, with her first solo exhibition in the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s in 1947.

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"I use objects a lot, but I never set up a conventional still-life composition and work from that. Instead I have things around me in the studio, perhaps beside me on a chair, and I add other objects as I develop the idea. I like the juxtapositioning of unrelated elements.
Sometimes people comment that a certain object doesn't look a bit like the real thing. I'm glad it doesn't! I prefer to use my imagination and change things around — I am not after a representational image."

— Mary Fedden - The Artist, May 2008

£4,000-6,000