Windmill, 1933

Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Prints and Printmaking, 1 February – 30 April 2011;
Berwick-upon-Tweed, Berwick Visual Arts (Granary Gallery), Spirited – Women Artists from The Ingram Collection, 26 May – 13 October 2018;
London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, 19 June – 8 September 2019;
Woking, The Lightbox, Centrepiece 2020, online exhibition July – September 2020;
Woking, The Lightbox, Redressing the Balance: Women Artists from The Ingram Collection, 11 August – 20 September 2020

Boston, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, British Prints from the Machine Age, Rhythm of Modern Life 1914-1939, 2008 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 99, p. 171)

Born in Bury St. Edmunds in England, Sybil Andrews moved to Canada in 1947, settling in Campbell River on Vancouver Island. In England, Andrews was part of the Grosvenor School, a group of artists influenced by Futurism, which celebrated the dynamism and movement of the machine age. Windmill was produced when Andrews shared a studio with Cyril Power in Hammersmith, a time in which Andrews produced an extraordinary body of work. In Windmill, she expresses the rhythms of nature through the wind, harnessed by this man-made machine. The model for this linocut was Elmers Mill, an old post windmill at the village of Woolpit, near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. Post windmills are so named because the main body or structure of the mill is attached, or balanced, on an upright post. By mounting the body (‘buck’) in this way, it can rotate to catch the variable direction of the winds. Andrews sets the viewpoint from below, emphasising the rotating blades that dominate the sky. The form is streamlined and stylized, curving and pointed, increasing the sense of dynamic movement.