My grandmother, Veronica Gosling, was a writer, visual artist and curator whose life brimmed with curiosity and creative energy. To many, she was a distinctive artistic presence in Exeter, always asking “Why not?” and “What if?”
Veronica, who has died aged 94, was drawn to found objects for their shapes, textures and hidden histories, liberating them from their original purpose and setting them loose in new imaginative lives. In periods of upheaval she turned to painting, creating bold, layered works. Her home became an extension of her imagination: walls, corners and even appliances were quickly claimed by colour.
Curiosity drove everything she made. Although she sometimes doubted she was a “real artist”, she learned from carpenters, electricians, blacksmiths and engineers, and from friends and family enlisted to test materials or hang sculptures from trees. Even discarded fish bones became art; her 2019 piece Smoked Mackerel was completed before supper was served.
She was born in London, the daughter of Robert Henriques, a writer, broadcaster and novelist, and his wife, Vivien (nee Levy). During the second world war, Veronica was sent with her elder brother to the US. On returning to Britain, she was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and, at 24, published the first of five novels, Love from a Convict (1955), about a young reporter who falls in love while visiting a jail, early evidence of her perceptive storytelling and her lifelong interest in human behaviour. Norman Shrapnel in the Manchester Guardian described it as “something of a tiny Wuthering Heights”.
At around the same time, she began work as a journalist in Plymouth on the Western Morning News before marrying the psychoanalyst Robert Gosling in 1958. Together, they raised five children.
The last of her novels, Tom’s Sister, was published in 1977. The following year, she and Robert left London for the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, and there she discovered her visual language. Having long “listened to conversations and written them down”, she felt in the countryside she “had nothing to write about”, and so she turned to looking instead – sketching people’s attitudes and movement and transforming her observations into sculpture, clay, mixed media and assemblage.
Robert died in 2000, and three years later she moved to live in Exeter, and founded Studio 36, a space for experimentation where poetry, dance, song, video and painting could collide. She delighted in events that mixed forms and communities, from “Creative Integration Day”, working with newly arrived Exonians, to the playful performance-poetry-piano fusion of “Hello Beckett!”. She also ran painting workshops for people with dementia and their carers, convinced that everyone carried creativity within them.
Her community art-board project Get on Board, launched in 2020 with support from Exeter council, drew contributions from across the city, including from Exeter prison. She was still working on it days before her death.
Veronica is survived by her four sons, Jonathan, Will, Sam and Roly, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. A daughter, Louisa, died last year.
