Jocelyn Horner

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Jocelyn Horner (1902 – January 1973) was a British sculptor and teacher from Halifax, West Yorkshire. Born at Green Hayes, she lived much of her life in Halifax. She studied at Halifax High School, Grovelly Manor in Bournemouth, and then the Leeds School of Art (1920), where she trained as a sculptor alongside Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. She began making animal studies and portraits of children while still a student.

During World War II she worked as a home tutor for blind people in Halifax and served as a Red Cross nurse. After the war she returned to Leeds as a student and later taught part-time in the 1950s at Percival Whitley College and Halifax Art College. In the 1960s her work, influenced by Jacob Epstein, was shown in Yorkshire and elsewhere. She won the Leeds Gold Medal for Yorkshire artists in 1951 and created major commissions, including a bronze group of the three Brontë sisters for the Brontë Parsonage Museum and a bust and hands of Sir John Barbirolli for the Hallé Concert Society in Manchester.

Her Head of a Blind Man is held by the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. Leeds City Art Gallery also holds her works, and a memorial show was held at Stable Court Galleries near Leeds. In 2013, a Blue Plaque was unveiled on the Green Hayes house where she was born and died.