Mitzi Cunliffe - Man-Made Fibres

The American sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe (1918-2006, née Solomon) was born in New York and is renowned for having designed the famous theatrical mask for the BAFTA award. Cunliffe was active as a designer of jewellery, textiles and glass, as well as teaching in later life. She studied Fine Art at Columbia University from 1935-40. In 1949, she came to England when she married a British academic and moved to Manchester. Her first large-scale public piece was created for the Festival of Britain in 1951 - Root Bodied Forth which was an 8-foot concrete group. In 1955, the same year she designed the famous BAFTA award, she was commissioned to create a major piece for the new Man-Made Fibres building at the University of Leeds. Professor J B Speekman, Head of the Department of Textile Industries, required a piece which would reflect the exciting progress in the field of synthetic fibres. Cunliffe submitted drawings and a maquette for a vast pair of hands with textile fibres crossed between them, to be executed in Portland stone. Man-Made Fibres was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh when the new building was opened in June 1956. Mitzi Cunliffe appropriately designed her own dress and jewellery for the event.

Cunliffe spent her entire working life bringing sculpture and architecture together. She wanted her work to be 'used, rained on, leaned against, taken for granted', declaring that her life-long dream 'is a world where sculpture is produced by the yard in factories and used as casually as bricks'. In this case however, Man-Made Fibres is positioned so high on the Clothworkers' Building South that it can easily be missed.