Norma Redpath was a modern sculptor renowned for her woodcarvings and monumental bronzes. She divided her time between Australia and Italy, where she cast her major works including Dawn Sentinel (1962, National Gallery of Victoria), Immortal Warrior (1963–64, Reserve Bank, Adelaide), the Treasury Fountain (1964–1969, Treasury, Canberra), Sculpture Column (1968–1971, Reserve Bank, Brisbane) and Extended Column (1972–1975, Australian National University School of Music), as well as intricate small bronzetti.
She initially studied commercial art at Swinburne Technical College, but her father’s death from tuberculosis in 1940, a mental breakdown in 1943 and her own contraction of tuberculosis in 1944 interrupted her studies. She returned to Swinburne in 1946 to study painting before switching to studying sculpture at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) during the period 1949–1955.

Her early stone- and woodcarvings, inspired by Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), earned her the Stanley Hammond Sculpture Prize at the Victorian Sculptors’ Society exhibition in 1953. In the same year she joined fellow modernists Julius Kane (1921–1962), Inge King (1915–2016) and Clifford Last (1918–1991) to exhibit as the Group of Four at the University of Melbourne’s Architecture School. This was the kernel of the Centre Five group, of which she was a founding member in 1962, which helped promote modern sculpture in Australia.

On her first visit to Italy in 1956–1957, she studied at the Università per Stranieri, Perugia, before travelling through Europe. In Rome she cast her first two bronzes, finding the lost wax process liberating. On return to Melbourne, her thoughts turned to bronze even while she completed the large Aeropagitica relief carving (1958–1961) for the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library.

At the inaugural Mildura sculpture triennial, her Dawn Figure (1961), in plaster for bronze, won the prize for monumental sculpture (destroyed in a studio fire, 1967; never cast). She spent the next year in Milan, on an Italian Government Scholarship, studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, working at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia and meeting contemporaries Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926), Alik Cavaliere (1926–1998) and Kengiro Azuma (1926–2016). There she cast Dawn Sentinel (1962), which featured at her critically acclaimed debut solo show in 1963 at Melbourne’s Gallery A. The same work again took first prize at Mildura in 1964.

Throughout the 1960s, N. Redpath’s visual lexicon referenced geological strata, caves, animals and the sun to create bronzes suggestive of Australia’s arid landscape. At her 1970 solo show at the Rudy Komon Gallery, in Sydney, classical arches, columns and walls predominated. These references can also be seen in Flying Capital (1970–1974), a memorial to her late partner, Professor Sydney Dattilo Rubbo, which she designed pro bono for the University of Melbourne.

Retreating from the public eye in her final years, she and her second husband, Tony d’Altamer, renovated a historic bluestone cottage in Carlton (now the Norma Redpath Studio artists’ residency, managed by the University of Melbourne). After two decades of ill health, and finally Alzheimer’s, she died in 2013.