Career
They traveled in an old battered car to Yugoslavia, on the pretence of a camping holiday. They only had passports for themselves. The children were not included on them.
Reunited with the children, they traveled through Italy and crossed into France.
They were finally granted the necessary visas to enable them to settle in Britain. Her first private commission in Britain, in 1975, was from Kathleen Hunt of Walthamstow, for a 70 cm resin statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus (The Madonna).
She has sculpted many monumental portraits and busts since, including Freddie Mercury of Queen, now in Montreux, Switzerland. Beau Brummell in Piccadilly, London, and many in private collections.
(Her statue of Mercury served as a model for the large illuminated statue that currently dominates the front of the Dominion Theatre in London since the May 2002 premiere of the musical We Will Rock You)
Commissioned portrait heads include Laurence Olivier (she also modelled the huge head used for his appearance in Dave Clark"s musical Time at the Dominion Theatre), Donald Sinden, Paul Eddington, Richard Briers, Jimmy Edwards, Ted Moult, Bobby Charlton, Lord Litchfield and Sir Frank Whittle.
In August 1992 her work was shown at the Czechoslovakian Embassy in London as part of an exhibition devoted to the work of five distinguished Czechoslovakian émigré sculptors. She has been married several times, lastly to the sculptor Franta Belsky, who died in 2000. In late 2010, visual artist Aleksandra Mir befriended Sedlecká.
A series of interviews in the following spring led to the publication of a monograph on Sedlecká"s life and work together with an unsolicited proposal of bringing the statue, now exiled in Montreux, back to London on temporary loan and to place it on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar square.
The idea has been met with varying reactions while the petition continues to gather signatures from all over the world.