A 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’s 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.
Anyone who has seen the capital’s other new public sculpture of a staunch historical defender of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, might understandably baulk at Wilkinson’s 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?
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.
Maggi Hambling’s statue of Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in 2020 following a decade of private fundraising
© Grim 23
Lack of method
A survey of sculpted female forms on the capital’s streets, London’s 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.
The first sculpture in London to commemorate a named, non-royal woman, the actress Sarah Siddons, by the French sculptor Léon-Joseph Chavalliaud, was 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 change.org petition, 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 was selected by a commissioning body of arts professionals and campaigners along with Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and creative industries.
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 “Mary on the Green”, 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 £143,000 from supporters across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Public perspective
The sculpture, gleaming silver atop a blocky plinth of black stone, features a tiny figure, which depicts what Hambling has termed an “Everywoman”, 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. “Some people like my work, some hate it,” she told Rix in an interview in the book. “The 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—it inhabits your space.”
Wilkinson’s tribute, by contrast, was essentially serendipitous; installing it in Coronation Gardens was the artist’s idea, not the impetus for the commission. As part of its ongoing campaign to restore London’s 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.
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 £15,000 to a total cost of £37,500. Upon the unveiling, the park’s Friends association called for the public’s help because unexpected costs had pushed the project over budget.
A statue of Mary Woolaston was unveiled in King’s Cross in June; the 18th-century well keeper is only the seventh woman of colour to be commemorated in London
Penny Dampier
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—Florence Nightingale or Ada Lovelace, for example—or 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— The Awakening, by Unus Safardiar, installed in 2002—a 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.
“We are living in a statue boom,” 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’ school in Kolkata, was installed in 2023.
From allegorical to real
For centuries, female figures in public sculpture were either royal or symbolic (allegories, muses and virtues), unnamed, often unclothed. But to Rix’s mind, the new Coronation Gardens statue is “indicative of the times” in that it replaces an allegorical figure with a real one. Brett concurs. She sees her role as giving Wilkinson a voice. “I immersed myself in the story of Fanny Wilkinson. She became a real person to me. She didn’t care. She wasn’t courting publicity. She lived to a ripe old age and ended up in Suffolk, breeding goats.”
Public art is political. Whether the response to the statue in question is laudatory or critical, it triggers crucial conversation. London’s 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—a beautiful, life-sized stone depiction of the 18th-century well keeper Mary Woolaston by Marcia Bennett-Male—was unveiled in June, in a community garden in King’s Cross, the artist Gaylene Gould underscored the wider social benefit such projects bring. “Public healing spaces, like the well Mary is said to have kept at King’s Cross, are needed now more than ever,” she told the Londonist. “These spaces of public healing are crucial sites of community, bringing us together and encouraging connection in an age of increasing disconnection and loneliness.”
