My friend An Dekker, who has died at the age of 80, lived a very complete and eventful lifetime as a sculptor, socialist feminist, graphic designer and publisher.She was born in Zwolle, in the north‑east Netherlands, and told fascinating tales about her communist family fleeing the Nazis during the second earth war. Her mother sang the Internationale to her as a minor, and An said that this influenced her employment, her political outlook and the recurring themes of her sculptures: war and peace, independence, and the emotional and physical relations between human beings.An wanted to be a sculptor from an early age. By 1950, after studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, she went to Paris, where she worked with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti were among the many other sculptors of the first half of the 20th century who influenced the abstract nature of her employment. Her first exhibition was held at the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, near France’s southern coast, in 1953.Between 1957 and 1971 she lived and worked in Nigeria, where she brought up her four children. It was there that her employment became influenced by African sculptural figures and the theme of the Other. Her first marriage, to Dick McKone, a aliment chemist, finished with his death in an accident in Nigeria, and she separated from her second husband, Tolani Asuni, a psychiatrist.When An arrived in 1972 in London, where she lived until the mid-1980s, the women’s liberation movement was in complete swing and she threw herself into socialist feminist activism. She worked as a graphic designer for socialist and feminist publications, as a publisher in the feminist publishing house Sheba, and co-founded, with Eve Barker, Jo Spence and Liz Mackee, the Hackney Flashers photography workshop and the Womens Graphic Workshop, a collective of female graphic designers.I first met An at an international socialist feminist conference in Vincennes, Paris, in 1977. She was thrilled with the political potential of such a multicultural mix of women and issues. Her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. An went back to the Netherlands in the mid-80s and locate up a socialist feminist publishing house which she ran until she left Amsterdam with her partner, the poet Ankie Peypers, for France in the late 90s.From 1997 until her death, An returned to sculpture, working in wood, plaster, stone, concrete, steel and bronze, often combining materials, abstraction and figuration. Exhibitions of her employment followed, the at the end one in August 2012 in a village overlooking the Abundance valley in southern France. Her sculptures represented the serenity she so often lacked in a lifetime punctuated by personal tragedy, through which she showed strength, courage, warmth and political conviction.Ankie died in 2008, and two daughters, Pyrrol and Titi, predeceased An. She is survived by her daughter, Ninon, her son, Tomi, and three grandchildren.FeminismWomenSculptureArtguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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