Blind School: Music Room

Armed with the preparatory sketches, Koenig began the bas relief sculptures in clay, adding to them section after section, until the composition was ready to be cast in bronze (unlike other sculptures by the artist, which were left in terracotta and stained with dark ink).

The reliefs record anonymous students completing classroom tasks with conscientiousness and devotion. Many of the figures are depicted with their backs to the viewer, whilst others bear abstracted expressions. Koenig resists stereotypification by portraying body language as a mark of personality to constitute what she calls each person’s unique ‘rhythm’. Her ability to capture these distinct characters – through bent necks, tracing fingers, and tucked feet – reflect the extended observations she made at the school during her residency.

As in her factory works, the figures are integrated into their environment so that they form a single unit. She manipulates perspective in a technique almost peculiar to painterly form. Flattened dimensions suggest an inescapable relationship of individuals to matter and space. Students are bound to the guitars, books, and bowls, which consequently characterise and determine the nature of activity. The same series also featured the school’s swimming pool, not part of The Women's Art Collection, but nevertheless significant because it marked a difference in style whereby the figures merge into an even flatter and more expressionistic composition with the background.

The physicality of the finished reliefs reinstate the importance of tactility to visually-impaired individuals as a mode of daily living. Through her characteristic sculptural technique, such scenes could be ‘seen’ by the students through touch.