Study for Blind School: Class Room

Between 1985–6, Ghisha Koenig was commissioned to produce a series of works by the London Society School for the Blind at Dalton House in Seal (Kent). Koenig spent nearly three months at the School making the sketches before she began work on the reliefs in her London studio.

The studies are records of her working process. They provide direct insight into her observational drawing method – a skill that she had honed on the factory floor and down the mines; for example, spending three days (including a full seven-hour shift) underground making sketches in the Chislet pits near Canterbury. The sketches at the blind school constitute another record of humans at work, based on Koenig’s belief that ‘An artist should try to say as directly as he possibly can what he sees. Art is visual.’ These on-the-ground sketches, as expressive marks of pose and movement, informed the resultant bronze reliefs.