Diana Thomson created the wonderful statue of D.H. Lawrence ON at the University of Nottingham and is still creating new work inspired by him. The D.H. Lawrence Society asked Diana about the nature of this inspiration…
‘Please don’t think I am trying to be pompous (DHL would abhor that!) but I have chosen the discipline of sculpture to express myself. I use images not words. I hope my full-length homage to DHL, which was inaugurated in 1994, says what inspired me about Lawrence.
Diana Thomson's sculpture of D.H. Lawrence
‘I did a lot of research for this figure. I used Keith Sagar’s collected letters. I met Lawrence’s niece, Mrs. Margaret Needham at her home, and subsequently in the Library at the University, with Dr Dorothy Johnson and the Chancellor. I was shown handwritten manuscripts, by DHL himself, (which were a revelation) and I think the most revealing thing about him was what other people said about him in their letters.
‘I have studied his poetry and have done a few small pieces inspired by this. I have adhered to my admiration for him, throughout my life, and as I get older, more of him is revealed to me as a philosopher. I wonder at the amount of work he managed to do throughout his short life. If you sat down to copy it all by hand, let alone think about it and create it, you would be hard pressed to complete the task.
‘Lawrence is not glib or easy. He is revealed to you, only if you put the hard work in. He has been sensationalised and reviled, by those only looking on the surface. On my website you will see my latest DHL offering of a drawing called THOUGHT (inspired by his poem), This was done in 2022, when I was 83. I cannot manage to do large pieces now, but am doing smaller work including plaques and drawings. And I have scaled down because I like to do it all by my own hand, while I still can.’