Design and Art Australia Online

sculptor, jeweller, embroiderer and commercial designer, was born at Mellool Station Moulamein, NSW. Her mother died when she was a child and she was placed in the care of relatives in England. After she returned to Australia in about 1914 her father remarried and she was again placed with relatives. She frequently escaped from an unhappy home life to perform minor roles in the theatre, with the Alan Wilkie Shakespearian Company and later in melodramas. She adopted a new name taken from her great-grandmother, Loma Lomax, and her great-great-grandfather, General Peter Latour, which she commonly also spelt 'Lautour’.

On 28 December 1928, Loma entered into a brief marriage with Ray Lindsay, Norman and Rose Lindsay 's son. She apparently studied sculpture at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff in about 1930 then applied her modelling skills to many commercial and industrial arts, including producing a range of aggressively modernistic chrome-plated lamps, bookends and table-tops in 1935. She achieved a steady living in sculpture by producing modelled figures in a great variety of forms. In 1938 alone, as well as The Boxer , she modelled figures for floats in Sydney’s sesquicentenary celebrations ( see Thelma Afford), made models of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for Sewell & Co., some of which were included in Nock & Kirby’s Christmas window display, and executed plaster decorations for the Minerva Cinema at Kings Cross. Holly Farram, Loma’s proclaimed favourite model, posed for the lightly clad Art Deco figure in the last.

Loma began exhibiting in 1935, at the Combined Hobbies Exhibition and the Women’s Industrial Arts Society (with former Hoff students Barbara Tribe , Jean Broome-Norton and Marjorie Fletcher ). Her first solo exhibition, held in the Women’s Industrial Arts Society’s rooms in July 1936, was mainly of pottery and small models, the fruit of her six-month sojourn with Mashman Brothers Pottery where her design for a garden urn was evidently put into production. Her second solo show, in July-August 1938 at the Castlereagh Fine Art Gallery, included figures inspired by neoclassical, pagan and modernistic sources. Titles such as Virility , Action , Dancer and Flight suggest a 'Hoff School’ interest in the vitality of the human figure in motion, while the exotic – evidenced in works like The Aztec and Nirvana – held a special appeal. She was commended for a portrait of the Bulletin artist Les Such, for Tamil Woman and for Balinese Dancer (p.c.). (The last has obvious parallels with Norman Lindsay’s Seated Nymph in his garden at Springwood.) From the exhibition the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW purchased The Egoist , a ceramic faun-like head. She exhibited with the Society of Artists in 1936-37 and with the Royal Art Society in 1936-40. In 1937 she assisted John Harvey with his relief mural for the Atlantic Oil Company’s exhibit at the Royal Easter Show. She was also an accomplished embroiderer, favouring paisley-like designs, but it is highly unlikely that any examples survive.

Lautour remarried Victor Jamieson, a former Japanese POW, in 1941. He died in 1946 (thereby gaining her a war widow’s pension). After the war she began making jewellery, and it was as a jeweller that she became known in Brisbane. She also worked briefly as a modeller for Stone’s Pottery at Coorparoo. She exhibited bronze masks and jewellery at the 62nd Royal Queensland Art Society Exhibition, with the Half Dozen Group and, later, at Brisbane’s Moreton Gallery (from 1950). Much of her jewellery was sold through her friends Cecilia McNally, an antique dealer, and Agnes Barker who ran the Bronte Gift Sho

Although Lautour did little sculptural work in Brisbane, the Queensland Art Gallery purchased a lead Negro Head from her studio in 1953. Finally she left Brisbane and lived with a cousin Roy Needrie at Stradbroke Island. After a vicious sexual assault in 1962, she died at the Repatriation General Hospital, Greenslopes, Brisbane in 1964.

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R.

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011