Works in our collections
A photographer, author, campaigner, and editor, Darke was the eldest daughter of an actress, Betty Cowen, and a Cornish farmer, Bob Darke.
Her siblings were Nick Darke, a Cornish playwright, and Caroline Darke, a designer and leatherworker. At 16, Darke took up a place at St Martins School of Art in London and then a photography apprenticeship with innovative photographic designer Maurice Rickard. She married Richard Lawson and had two daughters. The family lived between Cornwall and London.
In the 1980s she wrote a number of topographical books on different parts of Britain, including London, Cornwall, and Yorkshire, and was eventually commissioned to write what was initially to be called the National Trust Book of Monuments. After nearly a decade of research, it was published in 1991 as The Monument Guide to England and Wales. It was partly this endeavour which led to her founding of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA), which she chaired from its establishment in 1991 until 2009. Under the umbrella of the PMSA she, with others, launched The Sculpture Journal, an influential publication on European sculpture which continues today and the National Recording Project, a two year project established to document all public sculpture in the UK. She died in 2010 of cancer.