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<\/p>\nA small park south of the river Thames, London, welcomed its newest public sculpture this summer: a small bronze of Fanny Wilkinson, a pioneering suffragist, public health advocate and the UK\u2019s first female professional garden designer. The statue stands 72cm tall, on a giant, rough-hewn piece of granite, in Coronation Gardens in Wandsworth, and was designed by the British sculptor Gillian Brett.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has seen the capital\u2019s other new public sculpture of a staunch historical defender of women\u2019s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, might understandably baulk at Wilkinson\u2019s diminutive size. The sculpture, which was designed by the artist Maggi Hambling in 2020, also features a tiny woman. It begs the question, why do these tributes to such outsized persons have to be so small?<\/p>\n
A closer look at both pieces reveals crucial differences, not just in what the artists have made but in how they came to occupy the public sphere. They also speak to a recent shift towards improved representation. As recently as in 2021, an Art UK Sculpture survey found that of the roughly 1,500 monuments in London, 20.5% were dedicated to named men but only 4% to named women. There were twice as many sculptures of animals than of named women. But in the four years since, there have been more unveilings of statues of women than in the whole of the second half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Maggi Hambling\u2019s statue of Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in 2020 following a decade of private fundraising<\/p>\n
\u00a9\u00a0Grim 23<\/p>\n
Lack of method<\/p>\n
A survey of sculpted female forms on the capital\u2019s streets, London\u2019s Statues of Women, by the journalist Juliet Rix, reveals that there is little method to the urban art we encounter as we go about our daily lives. Rix puts this down to high costs and the involvement of a lot of different stakeholders.<\/p>\n
The first sculpture in London to commemorate a named, non-royal woman, the actress Sarah Siddons, by the French sculptor L\u00e9on-Joseph Chavalliaud,\u00a0was installed in 1897. But it took more than a century for a woman, Millicent Fawcett, to join the men adorning Parliament Square. The feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez campaigned for two years to make that happen, garnering the support of around 85,000 people, via a\u00a0change.org\u00a0petition, as well as the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The sculpture was commissioned as part of 14-18 NOW, the nationwide First World War centennial arts programme. The artist Gillian Wearing\u00a0was selected by a commissioning body of arts professionals and campaigners along with Justine Simons, London\u2019s deputy mayor for culture and creative industries.<\/p>\n
The Wilkinson and Wollstonecraft tributes have come about in altogether more discrete ways. It took the grassroots charity Newington Green Action Group ten years of dogged private fundraising, in a campaign dubbed \u201cMary on the Green\u201d, to erect the Wollstonecraft memorial. Hambling was invited (along with one other artist) to propose an idea for how to best commemorate the author. Seven hundred and forty-seven members of the public gave their views on her proposal; and the campaign raised a total of \u00a3143,000 from supporters across Europe, Asia and the\u00a0Americas.<\/p>\n
Public perspective<\/p>\n
The sculpture, gleaming silver atop a blocky plinth of black stone, features a tiny figure, which depicts what Hambling has termed an \u201cEverywoman\u201d, emerging naked from a much larger organic mass, redolent of abstracted female forms. Hambling has said that people react differently to something being outdoors because they have less choice about whether to see it or not. \u201cSome people like my work, some hate it,\u201d she told Rix in an interview in the book. \u201cThe difference is in how people see them. Paintings are safely on a wall in a gallery. You can choose to look at them or not, whereas public sculpture confronts you\u2014it inhabits your space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilkinson\u2019s tribute, by contrast, was essentially serendipitous; installing it in Coronation Gardens was the artist\u2019s idea, not the impetus for the commission. As part of its ongoing campaign to restore London\u2019s drinking fountains, the Heritage of London Trust (HOLT) set about restoring the Edwardian drinking fountain at the heart of the park: a granite boulder with an Art Nouveau tap and basin and an empty ledge.<\/p>\n
The Putney School of Art and Design and its Friends association organised an open competition to replace the original sculpture, which depicted a mythological water carrier and was stolen long ago. Brett proposed a figurative statue of Wilkinson, who she had learned designed the garden. Her winning idea was then realised, and funded, in concert with several local charitable foundations, including the Friends associations of the park and of the art school, the Drinking Fountain Association and London Stone Conservation, as well as the local council. HOLT contributed \u00a315,000 to a total cost of \u00a337,500. Upon the unveiling, the park\u2019s Friends association called for the public\u2019s help because unexpected costs had pushed the project over budget.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
A statue of Mary Woolaston was unveiled in King\u2019s Cross in June; the 18th-century well\u00a0keeper is only the seventh woman of colour to be commemorated in London<\/p>\n
Penny Dampier<\/p>\n
Although remembrance happens in the public sphere, it is rarely co-ordinated or funded at a governmental level. Happenstance and individual initiative are far greater driving forces. It is unknown how many First World War memorials are in existence because, for the most part, members of the public erected them to remember specific people they had lost. Similarly, the women commemorated in London are by turns obvious candidates\u2014Florence Nightingale or Ada Lovelace, for example\u2014or complete unknowns, championed by a tiny group of determined fans (the Friends of, the family members) who move mountains to get them made. In one instance\u2014\u00a0The Awakening, by Unus Safardiar, installed in 2002\u2014a son convinced a local council to lift a byelaw banning new statuary in Regents Park so that a tribute to his mother could be installed in the garden she had loved best.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are living in a statue boom,\u201d Rix says. The most recent additions take all shapes and sizes. In Westminster, a bronze tribute to Lovelace was commissioned by the property developer, the Berkeley Group, for its new Millbank Quarter residential block. And in Wimbledon, an homage to Sister Nivedita (aka Margaret Noble), a Northern Irish educator who founded a girls\u2019 school in Kolkata, was installed in 2023.<\/p>\n
From allegorical to real<\/p>\n
For centuries, female figures in public sculpture were either royal or symbolic (allegories, muses and virtues), unnamed, often unclothed.\u00a0But to Rix\u2019s mind, the new Coronation Gardens statue is \u201cindicative of the times\u201d in that it replaces an allegorical figure with a real one. Brett concurs. She sees her role as giving Wilkinson a voice. \u201cI immersed myself in the story of Fanny Wilkinson. She became a real person to me. She didn\u2019t care. She wasn\u2019t courting publicity. She lived to a ripe old age and ended up in Suffolk, breeding goats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Public art is political. Whether the response to the statue in question is laudatory or critical, it triggers crucial conversation. London\u2019s first statue of a named woman of colour, Joy Battick, was only installed in 1986. And justsix others have appeared since. When the most recent\u2014a beautiful, life-sized stone depiction of the 18th-century well keeper Mary Woolaston by Marcia Bennett-Male\u2014was unveiled in June, in a community garden in King\u2019s Cross, the artist Gaylene Gould underscored the wider social benefit such projects bring. \u201cPublic healing spaces, like the\u00a0well Mary is said to have kept at King\u2019s Cross, are needed now more than ever,\u201d she told the Londonist. \u201cThese spaces of public healing are crucial sites of community, bringing us together and encouraging connection in an age of increasing disconnection and loneliness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A small park south of the river Thames, London, welcomed its newest public sculpture this summer: a small…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":221279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,2676,120412,120410,67,132,68,120411],"class_list":{"0":"post-221278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-maggi-hambling","14":"tag-public-sculpture","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-women-in-art"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115192215165694467","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}