Statues – at least commemorative, memorializing statuary – is difficult for the modern world, and understandably so. I’m not big on it myself. The inevitability of fallen idols and all that.
Nonetheless, we still want to commemorate, and sometimes two dimensions does not seem enough. A couple recent examples of statues that, I think, work – one seen on a recent trip and another still in the proposal state:
The statue of James Meredith, the first African-American admitted to the University of Mississippi, which I saw a few weeks ago on my way to New Mexico.
Of course, there’s been controversy, including questions from Meredith himself, but I think it works and communicates effectively and in a quietly powerful way.
The sculptor’s explanation:
As a woman, it made sense to me that she had been interrupted from her work – she’d been sitting on the bench writing and reading when the visitor from Porlock appears. I preserved from Martin’s maquette her look of defiance/self-possession, but I also wanted to find a way to create a sense of immanence. This quality had been brought up by a friend about Wollstonecraft. She has risen from the bench, but knows her books have been brushed by her movement, so she is both moving forwards and reaching back simultaneously. Multi-tasking.
She was a writer, so it was essential to keep the quill in her hand for the strong message. Generally, props are bad for sculpture, so one tries to reduce them to a minimum. ‘Costume’ is a prop too – that is the difference between sculpture and Madame Tussaud’s – so although her clothes conform to the period, they aren’t costume. They’re drapery. Drapery has a specific and complex role in figurative art: it is used to create movement, compositional ‘framing’, suggest anatomy, even thought. There has always been abstract art – it’s right there in the two thousand year-old tradition of drapery.
Nonetheless, I stuck her in my own dressing gown (cf Balzac and Hogarth) that meets the style of the period, as writing in the eighteenth century without central heating was a cold profession, and I wanted to distinguish between a portrayal of her really doing her job and the portrayals (all by men) of Wollstonecraft sitting for posh portraits. The dressing gown also contributed to completing the pyramidal composition and solved a problem in the competition maquette where her dress imbalances the quote inscribed on the bench: it meant I could reduce the dress on the tight side and lift the dressing gown end up behind the bench to preserve the pyramid. I wanted to do that because of my belief that her quote – what she actually wrote – should be prioritised compositionally. The complexity of drapery at the back of the sculpture, for me, mirrors her thought.
Good compositional sculpture is incredibly demanding: it must work from all angles – in the round – and pull the viewer to move. The drapery helped with this, as well as uniting the vertical figure with the horizontal architectural axis of the bench – cf. the curved sweep at her front. The whole mass, even in the details, is a rhythm of pyramids. Pyramids focus energy: at the centre of the pyramids is the quill: the act of human agency.
Now. Let’s compare that to the competition-winning statue called “A Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft” erected in 2020.
So this new proposal (the first I cited) has been crowdfunded and created based on the runner-up design to this “winner.” You might disagree, but I find the newer proposal really beautiful and evocative – a fine representation of a woman, her personality and her contributions – rather than something that would undoubtedly make the honoree herself uncomfortable, to say the least.
Charlotte was Both 