Coventry University Archives: News

Artist and sculptor Peter Ball donates collection to the university archives

In December 2024, the University Archives & Special Collections team went to see a successful sculptor who, from his origins here in Coventry, has ‘carved out’ a career of over 60 years.

Peter Ball was born in Coventry in 1943, later attending the Coventry College of Art. After exhibiting in the Marjorie Parr Gallery, Chelsea from the early 60s, and as a contemporary of John Piper, Winifred Nicholson and John Hitchens, he began to create an influential list of buyers, some of whom became life-long patron collectors of his work alongside pieces by sculptor and artist Barbara Hepworth.

Initially a painter, Ball adopted sculpture as his foremost medium and has spent over 60 years creating works that utilise found objects and recycled wood as a base on which he embellishes with metals and paint. He has become a leading figure in British ecclesiastical art and, although he produces secular works, it is his religious work that has provided a great deal of recognition worldwide with works in many major British cathedrals and churches as altar pieces and other devotional subjects.

His donation consists of a wide variety of printed material covering his career and includes exhibition catalogues, press cuttings, books about him and postcards. He has also donated some framed paintings, produced as preparatory work ahead of altar piece commissions. We have also since received audio recordings, made by his late wife Jane, that chronicle his whole life and experiences growing up in Coventry, as an art student and teaching for a while at Lanchester Polytechnic.

His work represents a rare insight into arts practice and the enviable position of being an established sculptor from early in his career, able to focus on his craft, building a reputation worldwide.

As a collection, we look forward to the promise of further donations and are developing plans for an exhibition that will chart his career whilst also throwing light on the teaching practices and materials used at Coventry College Of Art – featuring items from Ball's donation and from art and technical manuals in the university library’s rare books collection, many of which would have been used at the time when he was a student at the college.

Anthony Hughes, Head of Archives, Special Collections & Heritage Programmes