GROWING up in the tightly packed terraces of Darnall, in the shadow of Nunnery Colliery, George Fullard spent his boyhood playing fast and wildly inventive games amongst the busy alleys and yards. Here, he felt he was “free to play 50 parts in one morning, to fly, to sail.” His memories of the unbridled freedom of childhood play remained a reference point for Fullard throughout his career and gave him a lifelong empathy with working-class life.

Living in a Sculpture, the latest exhibition at Sheffield’s Graves Gallery, explores Fullard’s life and work from the perspective of his Sheffield childhood, tracing his artistic development from his early days spent observing the city streets. Providing an insight into the breadth of his creative output, the exhibition has been developed in collaboration with the George Fullard Estate and Gallery Pangolin.

George Fullard was the youngest of six siblings and grew up in a working-class family with strong socialist beliefs and a commitment to trade unionism. His father, also named George, was a communist and union activist who worked as a miner at Nunnery Colliery throughout Fullard’s early childhood. 

In May 1926, George Fullard senior took a leading part in the famous coal strike and in 1934 went on to organise a pit deputies’ strike. For this, he was blacklisted, remaining out of work until the late 1930s when the renewed threat of war in Europe led to him finding employment with Sheffield City Council, advising householders on the construction of air-raid shelters.

When war did indeed break out in 1939, George Fullard was studying at Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts. The following December when the College was bombed in the Sheffield Blitz, he and his fellow students were instructed to meet in small groups around the city to work on projects designed to contribute their artistic skills to the war effort. 

This was perhaps serendipitous for the young Fullard, who was fascinated by both the daily activity of the city and the adaptability of those around him. 

Girl stretching, 1952 Photo: Steve Russell studios

He filled page after page with quick line drawings of miners, milkmen, butchers, market stallholders, mothers talking and children playing. Eschewing the destruction of war-damaged Sheffield, he instead focused firmly on the life and vitality of ordinary people, elevating the ordinary with a sense of wit and humanity. 

Living in a Sculpture takes these student drawings as a starting point through which the rest of Fullard’s work is framed. 

The women seen walking, waiting and talking in many sketchbook pages are brought to life in later works, their posture and character becoming exaggerated as Fullard becomes more assured. Equally, Fullard’s flair for capturing expression and movement and his sensitivity to human interaction, first evident in his Sheffield drawings, can be seen repeatedly throughout the exhibition.

Mother and child, 1956 Photo: Courtesy of the Fullard estate/Sheffield Museums

Fullard’s attraction to the everyday became literal in his later assemblage works, which saw him use discarded wooden objects recovered from bomb sites and demolished shops to create figures from the remnants of daily life. Using found objects was practical financially for Fullard but also enabled him to evoke a sense of familiarity and history. The objects he collected held their own memories, which Fullard connected and manipulated with his characteristic ease of intuition. 

His move towards assemblage was motivated by the work of Pablo Picasso, who would greatly inspire Fullard throughout the 1950s. Fullard admired Picasso’s seemingly limitless capacity for transforming ordinary objects and soon began to explore these possibilities within his own sculpture. As is often the case with Fullard, he related this inventiveness to the effortless imagination of children: 

“Just as the child, without effort, slips through imagination out of life to make a man of a pepper-pot, or the heaving deck of a ship-wreck from a placid pavement, so the artist works towards the miracle of making visible that which apparently could not exist.”

From 1960 to 1964, Fullard took this exploration of childhood imagination further with a series of works which combined the imagery of war with memories of days spent playing war games as a child in Sheffield. 

War had been prevalent throughout Fullard’s life and become equally inherent to his artistic practice. 

Born between the two world wars, as part of a generation he later referred to as caught “between two fires”, Fullard later joined the army, suffering near fatal injuries at the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944. This led to a lifelong fascination with war, shaped not only by his own direct experiences but also from the family war stories of horror and heroism from his youth:

“A man who has been in battle discovers the secret of himself – once found this secret can never be lost or forgotten, it exists for ever afterwards.”

Fullard’s war works from the 1960s were as playful as they were monstrous. Through them Fullard exploited the clichés of war, using parody and irony in order to recognise both horror and absurdity of battle.

One such work is Mounted Infant, a centrepiece of one of the exhibition galleries. 

This large, bronze sculpture shows a child playing at war with mock-heroic irony. As with many of Fullard’s works there is a playful, comic touch despite the solemn subject matter. 

The infant was inspired by Oskar, a character in Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, which is set in Germany during the second world war. In the book, Oskar is a three-year-old boy who refuses to grow up, instead using his glass-shattering scream as a weapon. 

In the exhibition, the figure of Oskar commands the gallery space, pointing his toy cannon menacingly at visitors from atop his makeshift steed. 

Living in a Sculpture closes with some of Fullard’s late assemblage works, this time concerned with the sea. The comparable calmness in these works is unnerving, particularly given the echoes of war which leave us uncertain as to whether the waters depicted are a place of safety or danger. 

This ambiguity brings a sense of underlying foreboding to these works, despite their whimsical nature. 

They seem a fitting bookend to an exploration of an artist whose body of work celebrates the simple wonder in our everyday lives, whilst simultaneously offering a hard-earned understanding of our very real mortality.

George Fullard: Living in a Sculpture is at Graves Gallery, Sheffield until July 1 2023. Free entry.