Censorship row over nude art

Alison Lambert said the drawings depicted human frailty

A Northern Ireland council has been accused of censorship after full frontal nude drawings were left out of an art exhibition.

Fermanagh District Council invited Surrey-born artist Alison Lambert to put on a show of eight foot charcoal drawings entitled The Human Image.

Two rear view nudes were included in the exhibition, but four frontal nudes were omitted from display at the council-run Higher Bridges Gallery in Enniskillen.

The artist said she was very surprised at the omission of four of the central drawings.

She said the council felt the images might offend people bringing their children to an adjacent coffee shop.

But she added: "I don't know really what the reason is".

"I was told there was a...group of politicians, or religious figures in the background somewhere that the people who ran the gallery and the head of leisure services were probably afraid of, and were afraid they might picket the gallery or cause some sort of trouble."

She said the drawings were intended to explore the frailty and vulnerability of the human image.

"These six drawings, larger than life size - about eight feet by five feet - are about what it is to be a human being.

"They are more about the emotion that I can convey. Things like the frailty and vulnerability of the human image."

'People patronised'

Alison, who has exhibited with the Jill George Gallery in London since 1995, said her drawings had toured many other galleries in the UK, receiving a very positive response.

She said even children who saw her drawings felt they were powerful and beautiful.

"They've been on show in the Isle of Wight, in Surrey, in London at the Jill George Gallery, the last place they were shown was at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry," she said.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of children going through, school parties, and all the comments in the comments book were wonderful."

Alison said people had felt offended and patronised by the council's omission of the drawings, and their replacement by some of her older work.

"Why did they (the council) hire the exhibition if they weren't going to actually show it, only part of it?" she said.

"What upsets me, is that I wasn't informed.

"Had I been informed that all they wanted to do was to substitute my mythological bull images for the human image, I would have said: "There's no point in you showing the whole show, I won't let you have it."

Alison's travelling retrospective exhibition started at the Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight in 2001 and her exhibition in 2002 is accompanied by the launch of The Human Image, a comprehensive book on her work.

The BBC contacted Fermanagh Council but they declined to make any comment on the exhibition.