Edna Manley

Other names: née Swithenbank

Born 20 February 1900
Died 2 February 1987

Active: 1918 - 1980

Country of birth: England

Country of death: Jamaica

Sculptor, teacher

Born in Bournemouth, Hampshire (based on the place of registration, her biography on the Jamaica Information Service website states she was born in Yorkshire). Edna's father was British Jamaican (Harvey Swithenbank, born c.1869) and her mother, Ellie Shearer, was Jamaican. Manley lived in Penzance, Cornwall for some of her childhood. During the First World War she undertook war work, including breaking-in half wild Canadian horses. She took private lessons with Maurice Harding and then studied at Regent Street Polytechnic and St. Martin's School of Art, London. In 1921 she married her cousin, Norman Washington Manley and emigrated to Kingston, Jamaica in 1922. In 1938 Norman Manley entered politics, and founded the People's National Party. Edna supported his political career and was also independently active in Jamaican culture and politics.

From Kingston, Jamaica she continued to make sculpture and from about 1925 largely worked in wood, using native trees including yacka, mahogany, Guatemalan redwood, juniper cedar, and primavera. She exhibited in London with the Society of Women Artists and the London Group and at a number of galleries over a forty year period, starting with the Goupil Galleries. She remained a presence in the British art world even though, as Kineton Parkes noted in 'The Art of Carved Sculpture' (1931), this was inhibited by the size and cost of shipping her work to London. Her work is represented in UK public collections, notable 'Eve', 1930, mahogany in Museums Sheffield.

Her first solo exhibition in Jamaica was in 1937. The show is sometimes regarded as a turning point in the expansion of Jamaica's visual culture as it prompted the first island-wide group exhibition of Jamaican artists. Active for much of her life as an artist, she also helped found and then taught at the Jamaica School of Art, now a component of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts. When Manley died in 1987, she was given an official funeral and buried in the tomb of Norman Manley at the National Heroes Park, Kingston, Jamaica.

There are biographical details for Edna Manley on the Jamaica Information Service website: http://www.jis.gov.jm/special_sections/ednamanley/bio.html (accessed 1 March 2013) and on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Manley (accessed 10 January 2013). There was a major retrospective of her sculpture at the National Gallery of Jamaica in
1990 and a book by David Boxer was published to accompany this event. An edition of her diaries was published by Andre Deutsch, London, 1989.

Citing this record

'Edna Manley', Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib6_1246612669, accessed 04 Jun 2023]