A pioneer of British abstraction, Sandra Blow (1925-2006) spent her artistic career exploring scale, colour, and composition through a diverse range of media. Known for her use of discarded materials, organic, and man-made resources, Blow’s compositions are typically large in scale and geometric in style and often fall between painting and sculpture in their form.

Blow was a member of the iconic St Ives School in Cornwall, where she and her contemporaries established themselves as pivotal in the development of abstract art in the early twentieth century. Those in the St Ives School were stylistically diverse, but each of them drew inspiration from the landscape within which they lived and is evidenced in the contrasting abstract works of Blow, for instance, and Peter Lanyon. The legacies left by this group of bohemian artists on the modern art movement in this small Cornish coastal town was reinforced in 1993 with the opening of Tate St Ives.

St Ives, Cornwall, is an internationally-recognised centre in the history and development of modern and abstract art in Britain, and continues to this day to be a vibrant and thriving community for the arts and culture. Commonly viewed as a destination for the avant-garde and experimental, St Ives first gained recognition following the foundation of the Leach Pottery in 1920, which is widely associated with shaping the emergence of studio pottery in the United Kingdom. The arrival in 1939 of some of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists transformed this British coastal town into an artists’ colony, and included Ben Nicholson whose influence helped establish St Ives as the nucleus of the modern art movement attracting both local and visiting students. The works of Alfred Wallis were discovered by Nicholson some eleven years previously, with Wallis subsequently becoming one of Britain’s best known naïve artists. The success of the St Ives School was formed by two distinct but interwoven narratives centred on the utopian ideals of constructivism and a tradition of craft and the handmade, which united works of ceramics, abstraction, and carving.