Artist Jann Haworth: ‘Sgt Pepper’s is just a record cover and I don’t think that’s very important’

When art student Jann Haworth took the number 30 bus from Harrods to her South Kensington bedsit one spring night in 1962, she wanted tulips but could not afford them. “Why not make a bouquet of tulips out of cloth?” she thought.

A tutor had informed her days before that female students were there “to amuse the boys”, but Haworth’s competitive instincts had identified in cloth something with which “I could run rings around the boys”. She had sewn her own clothes from the age of eight and by the time she got off the bus, she had designed an old lady to go with the tulips, a dog, doughnuts and a cup of coffee — all in cloth.

A pioneer of soft sculpture, for most of the past 30 years Haworth has resided in Utah, where we meet and where she has married street art and gender politics in a remarkable series of murals. For many years her 1967 co-creation of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover with her then-husband Peter Blake was either ignored or else dominated discussion of her work, but Haworth has forged on. Now, with a recent exhibition in London and a mural commission by the National Portrait Gallery that will anchor the museum’s reopening later this month, she is gaining a more nuanced appreciation of her work.

Haworth, who was born in Hollywood in 1942, grew up with parents who inspired her artistic vision. When her mother Miriam returned at night from attending an experimental Los Angeles art school, she taught her seven-year-old about composition, or deconstructing a Picasso painting, or the Bauhaus principles of design. Her father, production designer Ted Haworth, took her to visit the film sets he worked on. “Teddy gave me subject,” she says, namely what she calls the “fakery” of the film industry. There was the surrealism implicit in making “replicants” for the 1956 cold-war classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or riding the carousel in between takes of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. “Everything I do arises from the surrealism of film. If you make a doughnut out of cloth, that’s hilarious to me. It’s very much like making a prop for a film.”

Film production also shaped her politics. “On a soundstage, just like theatre, everybody is as important as everybody else. The carpenter was shown as much respect as the director. That mantra is in me: equality, democracy.”

After two years at UCLA, first philosophy then art, in late 1961 Haworth travelled to London and fell in love with England. By January the next year, she had enrolled at both the Courtauld Institute and the Slade School of Fine Arts, where she found tutor Harold Cohen insightful. “He was intellectually very rigorous and insisted that intuitive work was for the birds. You needed to justify every mark you made. Perfect meat and drink for me.”

While critic Kenneth Tynan rejected her cloth-rendered dog and flowers for the 1963 Arts Council Young Contemporaries show, her painting of a large-scale typewriter was included. Later that year the ICA picked Haworth’s soft-sculpture work for Four Young Artists: a cloth-made domestic scene of a life-size elderly woman, based on her great-grandmother, and the dog and flowers Tynan had snubbed. “I was totally delighted and surprised, and very aware that nothing like this would ever have happened to a student in the US, where only established artists were getting shown.”

In the spring of 1963 she met artist Peter Blake, 10 years her senior, and they married in July. Haworth was taken on by high-profile art dealer Robert Fraser and had her first solo show in 1966. Among her pieces was “Pom-Pom Girl”, a three-dimensional figure pinned to the wall like a butterfly, appearing, Haworth says, “caught between a cheer and a scream”. The show was well received by critics, including one surprise. “The irony was that when I showed at Fraser’s, Tynan was super-supportive and interested.”

The couple were commissioned in 1967 to do a graphic cover for Sgt Pepper. While Blake was a Beatles fan, to Haworth it was one more gig. “They were a white boy band. I wasn’t that interested in that music.” The Beatles chose a third of the heads, Blake and Haworth the rest. “It’s just a record cover and I don’t think that’s very important.”

After divorcing Blake in 1979, Haworth and writer Richard Johnstone moved into “a huge, shambling, beautiful farmhouse” outside Bath, Haworth says, where their children could roam. Johnstone wrote children’s and YA books and Haworth illustrated them. There’s a whiff of Cold Comfort Farm as Haworth talks about always being broke, ice on the inside of the windows and hiring the local poacher to shoot their pigs before the family hung and butchered the carcass.

Haworth’s attention shifted abroad when she secured a fellowship to study textiles in the US. After her father died in 1993, the family moved into his mansion in Sundance, Utah. She describes Sundance as like “a crucible, it has mountains all the way around, and the giant Mount Timpanogos behind it with a 200-foot waterfall”. Haworth and her eldest daughter, abstract collage artist Liberty Blake, founded and co-ran the creative workshop Art Shack for Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Redford’s institute brimmed with independent artists from film, theatre and music, and Haworth felt she had found a bookend to her filmic childhood.

For Haworth, artistic renewal came through an unexpected reckoning in the early 2000s with Sgt Pepper, when she found a list compiled by Rolling Stone which proclaimed the Beatles album cover the greatest of all time. She re-examined it to discover that of its 65 people, only 13 were women, three of them Shirley Temple, although one was Haworth’s mannequin of the child actress. By way of apology and rebuttal, in 2005 Haworth did an outdoor mural in Salt Lake City called “SLC Pepper” which corrected the original’s gender and ethnic bias.

Since then, she and Liberty have pursued a dozen murals reflecting on gender politics, including their Work in Progress project, celebrating historic and contemporary women both known and unlauded. That project took on a transatlantic dimension when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned them to do a 130-head “Work in Progress”, celebrating a swath of women in British history and culture. Made largely by non-artists in the UK trained in stencil on Zoom by Haworth and Blake, it will be a central piece of the museum’s reopening.

In preparation for her recent show at Gazelli Art House in London, Haworth said she wanted to “sail close to the wind, to cut along the line between fine art and fibre arts, Surrealism and Pop, sculpture, garments and fashion”. She returned to her fascination with disrupting and deconstructing corsets, finding in their restrictions an echo of pandemic life. Haworth again has sought to break away from the tyranny of borders. “I just didn’t feel like being confined,” she says.

‘Work in Progress’ will be displayed when the National Portrait Gallery reopens on June 22, npg.org.uk