My mother, Cecile Elstein, who has died aged 87, had a passion for natural objects and making things with found materials. She was a sculptor, printmaker and environmental artist, whose work was about experience and the response to relationships and environments through feeling, thought and action. “Creativity works to adapt, repair and celebrate,” she said. “Material methods of artistic production begin with observation, investigation, research and design.”
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Cecile was the elder child of Michael Hoberman, who ran a thriving coal-delivery business, and his wife, Ruth (nee Rappaport). Her younger brother, Gerald, became a photographer and publisher. Cecile went to Cape of Good Hope seminary, a girls’ school in Cape Town, and studied sculpture with Lippy Lipshitz at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and then in the studio of Nell Kaye in the late 1950s.
