My mother, Cecile Elstein, who has died aged 87, had a passion for natural objects and making things with found materials. She was a sculptor, printmaker and environmental artist, whose work was about experience and the response to relationships and environments through feeling, thought and action. “Creativity works to adapt, repair and celebrate,” she said. “Material methods of artistic production begin with observation, investigation, research and design.”
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Cecile was the elder child of Michael Hoberman, who ran a thriving coal-delivery business, and his wife, Ruth (nee Rappaport). Her younger brother, Gerald, became a photographer and publisher. Cecile went to Cape of Good Hope seminary, a girls’ school in Cape Town, and studied sculpture with Lippy Lipshitz at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and then in the studio of Nell Kaye in the late 1950s.
Cecile was working as a lab assistant in Groote Schuur hospital when she met Max Elstein, a doctor, whom she married in 1957, aged 19. To escape apartheid they moved in 1961 to the UK, at first to London, where in 1965 Cecile became a pupil of the surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow.
In 1970, the family moved to Southampton, where Cecile set up a life-drawing group. She studied sculpture and printmaking at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham (now part of UCA, the University for the Creative Arts). In 1977, we moved to Manchester when Max took up the chair of obstetrics, gynaecology and human reproductive health at the university. Cecile set up her studio-workshop there, teaching “awareness through art”.
In 2001, she set up Didsbury Drawing, a life-drawing group based on a philosophy of non-interference. Cecile was influenced by the work of the philosopher Martin Buber and Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. She pursued accessible environments, empathy in design, and developed experimental methodologies. Between 1980 and 2019 she worked with Kip Gresham, a pioneering printmaker, at his Manchester and Cambridge workshops.
In 1983, Cecile was granted a North-West Bursary award for Mandarah, a pneumatic artwork; it toured to Singapore international arts festival, representing Britain. In 1986, she was a prize winner at the Ninth British International Print Biennale, Bradford; her public artworks include a site-specific sculpture, Tangents (1997), at the Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire.
Cecile also made commissioned portraiture, large abstract screen prints and “art in environment” works, which are held and exhibited in public and private collections, including the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Manchester Cathedral, Manchester Academy of Fine Art, Salford University Gallery, and the Royal Northern College of Music. Cecile was an influential presence in Manchester’s artistic and cultural life.
Cecile and Max cared for my brother, Paul, who had multiple sclerosis, from the 1980s until his death in 1998. Cecile is survived by Max, me, six grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
