The Shillams – a brief biography
Leonard Shillam and Kathleen O’Neill met as teenagers in 1932. They were at art school at the Brisbane Central Technical College – Len in second year, Kath in first. For about six months they were firm friends – studying, talking, thinking and pursuing their joint passion for art, often travelling to college together. In this time they built up their intimacy and knowledge of each other, gradually falling in love. They were part of a foursome which included fellow art enthusiasts Francis Lymburner and William Smith. Kath later related, “We rented a room that was part of the old Brisbane Courier (newspaper)… and it was from drawing there that we found sculpting… We were bridging the gap between Daphne Mayo and the young generation coming afterwards.” (Len and Kath Shillam Papers: 6015/27 Clippings folder, Bayside Echo, 7 February 2001, p.3.)
In 1937, Len won a Carnegie Corporation grant which funded overseas study by a promising artist for a two year period. While Len was in England they corresponded daily. Kath moved to Sydney, where she formed new artistic friendships and continued to work as a graphic designer by day and on her art at night. Only one year into Len’s study grant the London art schools closed with the outbreak of war in September 1939. Len returned to Australia and from that time on they spent every day together until Kath’s death in 2002 at the age of 87.
Len and Kathleen Shillam had long and successful careers, making their living at sculpture from the late 1940s. Based in a modernist tradition, the work made by Leonard and Kathleen Shillam may not appear avant-garde now. However in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s it was challengingly modern. Len became a prominent public artist, and press files detail controversy about the abstract qualities of his work, nudity within his figurative sculpture and complaints about their pioneering modernism in the conservative climate of the times. These incidents are well-documented in the Len and Kath Shillam Papers.
The Shillams remained bound to their individual artistic beliefs and interests, formed in the 1930s and 1940s. Len was quoted as saying, “As far as we were concerned the academic world had died and we went for the 20th century.” (Len and Kath Shillam Papers: 6015/27 Clippings folder, Bayside Echo, 1 February 2001, p.3.)
Len suggested that the idea of making art for a living, particularly modernist sculpture, was seen at this time as “ridiculous” with the kind of work he and Kath produced seen by the public as “a waste of good stone and wood. However when they had their first exhibition, at John Cooper’s Moreton Galleries in 1947, some works were sold and positive reviews were given by Gertrude Langer, art critic for Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper. “We took this as sufficient encouragement to continue”, he said. (Len Shillam, Interview for State Library of Queensland, 2005) Len and Kath’s lives were fused by this commitment to art, made when they were idealistic art students.
They were not able to marry until 1942. When they returned to Brisbane after Len’s London sojourn in 1939, they started a poultry farm. It allowed them to earn sufficient money to live whilst also providing them with the freedom to make art. In the late 1940s sculpture looked sufficiently promising to allow them to stop operating their poultry farm. They were able to eke out a living as sculptors from then on. Kathleen suggested that they may have been the first sculptors in Australia to make a living from their work. (Interview with Louise Martin Chew, 1996)
Early on they learnt to do things themselves to save money, building their own home, for example, on the banks of Bald Hills Creek, Brisbane. Their can-do attitude is exemplified by press cuttings from the time. In 1955, this report appeared in Australian Home Beautiful:
The satisfaction and joy of building one’s own house is something few of us know anything about. To most it seems an immense undertaking. But Kathleen and Leonard Shillam, two well-known Queensland sculptors who have built their own house on the banks of Bald Hills Creek, ten miles from Brisbane, refuse to admit the job was even difficult. Len says: “I have built a few chicken houses in my time, and a house is just the same as a chicken house, except it has lining.”
(Len and Kath Shillam Papers: 6015/25, ‘The House Two Sculptors Built’, Australian Home Beautiful, December 1955, p.17.)
Their careers were pursued separately from each other until relatively late in their lives. Leonard undertook more of the commissioned public sculptural work that was offered to them. Kathleen did some commissions but preferred to make work from her own creative impetus and then exhibit this work for sale. Len described the decision-making process concerning the commissions that came their way thus: “Kath would say as usual, ‘If either of us is going to do it, you are’.” (Len Shillam, Interview for State Library of Queensland, 2005)
While their primary goal was to make art, in later years they also gave significantly of their own time and energy as committed teachers, mentors, and art community participants.
Browse pictures from the Leonard and Kathleen Shillam Papers.
Last updated: 24th June 2011
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