AN ART installation at Ripon Prison and Police Museum will help raise awareness of a little known woman sculptor who was a contemporary of Gwen and Augustus John.

Louise Marchal is the great-great niece of Frances Darlington, the daughter of a Harrogate solicitor who studied in the 1890s at the Slade School of Art and produced several public works of art, including a First World War sculpture exhibited in the chapel at the museum.

Ms Marchal’s new work, Noble Bloods, for which she received Arts Council funding, is in response to Frances Darlington’s St George’s Police Orphanage First World War Memorial (1918).

Her mixed media installation, which commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of the war, will be on show beside the sculpture from Saturday, August 16, until the end of November.

The sculpture, showing St George allied with St Joan of Arc, was commissioned as a memorial to children raised in the police orphanage who fought and died in the war.

Ms Marchal recently published Finding Frances – a biography of Frances Darlington (Sculptor).

“As Frances was my grandmother’s aunt, I have been fascinated with her since I was a child and have been trying to research her life and work since I was 17,” she said.

The Victorian sculptor overcame obstacles facing women artists at that time to win public commissions, including a sculptural relief at St Wilfrid’s Church in her home town and a decorative scheme for the foyer of Harrogate Theatre. For more details, visit riponmuseums.co.uk