1945 -

Painter and sculptor. Born in Sudbury (Suffolk), she studied with Cedric Morris and Lett Haines at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing (19600, Ipswich School of Art (1962-640, Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1964-67) and at the Slade School (1967-69). In 1967 she went to New York with the Boise Travel Award. After briefly experimenting with audio-visual and conceptual techniques, by 1972 Hambling had returned to painting, adopting as her main subject down-and-outs and other social outcasts. In 1980-81 she was the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, where, after her tenure, in 1983, she exhibited a series of works devoted to the actor Max Wall. Other series have been devoted to the bullfight and to bulls and the minotaur in myth. In 1993 she started to work in brightly coloured ceramics, and in 1996 Marlborough Fine Art presented her first exhibition of sculpture. Her main public commissions for sculpture have been the Oscar Wilde Memorial for London (1998) and the shell-shaped memorial to Benjamin Britten(2003), sited controversially on the beach at Aldeburgh, and constructed by two local ironworkers, Sam and Dennis Pegg.