Sculptor and printmaker Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983) was a distinguished artist of broad sensibility. As a leading practitioner of twentieth-century graphic art, credited with modernising British wood-engraving, the dynamic potential of her sculpture was overshadowed. In her studio, carving and modelling coexisted with printmaking, unified by the natural world, and her examination of themes such as fecundity, mutability and duality were transferable between media.

Raised by German-born parents in rural Kent, Hermes' adolescence passed in the backwash of the First World War. The decision to choose art over farming followed a foundation year at Beckenham Art School from 1918 to 1919 – though she would return to draw the milking parlour.

Hermes attended the Brook Green School of Drawing in 1921 under maverick artist Leon Underwood, as had Blair Hughes-Stanton (whom she married in 1926), Eileen Agar, Henry Moore and Marion Mitchell. Underwood introduced these artists to the velo, a fine line multiple engraving tool that distinguished their mark making (and subject matter) from their more traditional contemporaries at the Society of Wood Engraving (SWE).

This group would go on to reinvigorate the medium – made clear in Hermes' modern Through the Windscreen (1929; she first experimented with the subject in 1925), in which a tree-lined road is dazzlingly lit by a speeding car's headlights.

In 1925 and while still in her 20s, Hermes co-founded the English Wood Engraving Society – a progressive, breakaway movement from the SWE. Hermes was forming a formidable catalogue of innovatory work. Her suite of 20 wood engravings for A florilege: chosen from the old herbals (1930/1931) by Irene Gosse, was pioneering in her isolation of the object in the picture plane. 'None but a sculptor's imagination could defy pictorial conventions in quite this way,' wrote Simon Brett.

These dark, inky blooms with one form enclosed within another produced, according to Brett, 'thunderous visual music'. In Harvest (1929), we have a scaffolding of plants, backlit by a vertiginous, funnelling of light, giving the work a spectral presence and indicating Hermes' cosmic viewpoint.

Nature in all its facets provided the armature of her work throughout her life. At school she won prizes for diving, had all the apparatus for salmon fishing, went out at night with purse net fishing boats (calling to mind her 1955 print Ringnet Fishers), and watched the gutting and gralloching of a deer. No wonder she was chosen to illustrate seminal works of the great field naturalists: Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1932), and Penguin editions of Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart (1938) and Izaac Walton's The Compleat Angler (1939).

Hermes found animal forms communicative and her animistic chalk pebble carvings from beach stones captured the essential disposition of the body in the manner of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (with whom she felt an affinity). Collecting wild stones was also particular to her peers, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

The shape of the pebble dictated the form within and in Baby from 1932 (an earlier version of a Baby, carved in the African hardwood lignum vitae in 1927, is now lost), we see Hermes revealing the whorl of an ear and the orbit of an eye from the surface of the chalk stone found at Pett Level, Hastings. A cast was made from the carving in terracotta, from which Hermes then made a cast in bronze. This entered the Tate collection in 1981.

Baby was exhibited in a landmark exhibition, 'Sculpture Considered Apart from Time and Place' at Sydney Burney Gallery, London in 1932, which juxtaposed modern sculptures with more than 100 works from indigenous and historical cultures. Hermes would display the terracotta carving of Baby at home on her own carved West African Luba Stool.

Birds recur in Hermes' work, as do hands – variously used to suggest themes of mutability, transformation, capture and alarm.

The exquisite modelling and incisions of Bird in Hand (1931), carved from lignum vitae – one of nature's hardest woods – are an early indication of her perfectionist finishing and polishing skills. This was the first of Hermes' works to enter a British public collection, in 1939.

Two in One (1937), Hermes' palm-shaped Janus head with its two faces, modelled in china clay whilst holidaying in Cornwall, produced an enigmatic piece akin to Surrealist Arthur Lett-Haines' 'petits sculptures'. Duality and conjoined figures would become a recurring theme.

During the early half of the twentieth century, the distinction between the 'fine' and 'applied' arts became much more blurred, with many artists becoming designers, for example. Hermes' work expanded to embrace glass, mosaic, murals and door furniture – including one in the shape of a swallow once owned by David Bowie.

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She also contributed to a complete decorative scheme for the New Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1932, commissioned by the architect Elizabeth Scott.

From 1934, Hermes exhibited with the London Group (elected 1935) and the Royal Academy (elected an Associate 1963) where she was their first female engraver. Alongside her more organic sculptural forms, Hermes also produced a number of representational sculptural portraits, often of friends as well as her children, whom she was raising alone while juggling her artistic career.

What elevated her portraits was their 'mental colour' (a term used by critic Richard Buckle to describe sculptor Jacob Epstein, with whom Hermes was most commonly linked), as seen in her capture of the spirited Reverend Conrad Noel, 'Red Vicar' of Thaxted.

Reverend Conrad Noel (1869–1942), Vicar of Thaxted

Hermes and her children spent the Second World War in Canada. During this period she undertook war work as a draughtswoman for shipyards and aircraft factories. She also befriended Pamela Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, on the crossing, going on to illustrate Travers' account of the journey, I Go by Sea, I Go by Land (1941).

Teaching – always printmaking – went hand in hand with exhibiting. Hermes' virtuosic early engravings were replaced in the post-war period with more simplified imagery and the overlaying of colour to produce additional tones.

When she returned to teaching printmaking (at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts from 1939 and then St Martin's School of Art from 1947), it was on the softer material of plank wood and lino, combining a large-scale format with the synergy and deftness of brushwork she admired in Japanese colour prints and in the Chinese stone rubbings that were used to wrap the exports she collected.

Hermes' animal drawings, where space is metaphysical as in cave paintings, were considered unique in their day. Drawing classes were held at the zoological gardens and students would meet outside the bird house, or the palm house if it was Kew Gardens, when the hellebores were blooming, followed by a crit and a spaghetti feast afterwards.

In 1939 she was chosen as one of seven engravers to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale and in 1952 was invited to join the Faculty of Printmaking, British School at Rome. The 1960s in particular were a fruitful time. In 1960 she won first prize in the V&A Giles Bequest competition for colour prints, by 1965 she was a visiting teacher at the RA schools (wood and lino-cutting and printing) and in 1967 made Honorary Fellow (RE) Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.

Hermes' reputation, to her dismay, revolved around her printmaking. As artist Albert Garrett wrote: 'By the end of the second world war... Hermes in engraving is what Hepworth is in sculpture.' That is until 1967, when she was awarded the Jean Masson Davidson Medal – the Society of Portrait Sculptors' highest award for distinguished services and outstanding achievement in the art of portrait sculpture. This award recognised her continuing experimentation and expressive working of clay, deploying bronze as a thin skin.

Although she didn't identify as a feminist, Hermes wrote a series of letters to the RA in 1966 questioning why women Academicians weren't admitted to dine with the men – 'I cannot accept sex discrimination in the world of Art' – which gives some sense of the barriers facing women artists at that time. Her friend, the architect Maxwell Fry, also left that evening, without sampling the banquet, in solidarity with Hermes. She would become a full RA in 1971.

In fact, women sculptors at the RA were themselves a rarity. In 2021, when we made the Sculpting Lives podcast episode on Hermes, in the series on women sculptors, Annette Wickham, a curator at the RA, had discovered only nine female sculptors at the Academy, of which six had been elected since 2009.

Hermes' reputation was consolidated in the autumn of 1967 with a comprehensive show of her output – including bronzes, drawings and wood engravings made between 1924 and 1967 – at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the best place at that time for expanding definitions of British art and attracting audience numbers.

Her friend, the novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison, wrote the catalogue – describing the artist as 'that wild girl Gert Hermes' – and fellow artist Prunella Clough chose the selection and installation with an emphasis on sculpture.

In 1981, Hermes' poetical taste and daring brought her a platform once again, when she was given the rare privilege of a retrospective at the Diploma Galleries – the sixteenth Member of the Academy to be awarded a solo exhibition since 1952. The exhibition was selected by David Brown, Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate. Her graphic work hung on his walls and would be bequeathed to the nation, finding their resting place in the British Museum.

In each of Hermes' retrospectives, sculpture predominated. Despite being an artists' artist, admired by peers and connoisseurs alike, her reputation plunged into relative obscurity after her death in 1983. This was remedied following the donation of her archive, in 2000, to the Henry Moore Institute, on which I based my monograph The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes, the original research for which informed the exhibition 'Wild Girl: Gertrude Hermes' at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2015.

This exhibition allowed a new generation to witness the synthesis of Hermes' sculptures, prints and metalwork, revealing the full extent of this pioneering artist's achievement.

Jane Hill, writer, curator and art historian

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation