The sculptor Martin Jennings has been selected by the UK government to create a statue of Queen Elizabeth II due to be erected in St James’s Park in London, it was announced this weekend.
The statue will form part of a larger memorial overseen by the architecture firm Norman Foster, who won the design commission earlier this year. The memorial scheme also incorporates a figurative sculpture of the late Queen alongside her husband Prince Philip at Birdcage Walk and a Prince Philip gate.
Jennings, who is based in the Cotswolds, tells The Art Newspaper that the sculpture is a work in progress: “There is pressure to get this right across the globe. People will have expectations [for the piece]. It's not that I see my task as slavishly responding to what other people want because after all, this will only work if it's a good sculpture.”
Despite this, Jennings says he is “purposefully avoiding coming to any firm decision about how this work will look” because he is “going to be influenced by what's coming in from interested parties”. The sculptor confirms that he plans to seek advice from the Queen Elizabeth Memorial Committee, the Foster + Partners architecture practice and the royal family.
The memorial will be paid for with public funds. According to the UK government, a provisional construction budget of £23m-£46m excluding VAT has been identified for the project.
This will not be Jennings first foray into royal depictions. His bronze bust of the Queen Mother was unveiled in 2000 in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and in 2022 he was commissioned by the Royal Mint to produce an effigy of King Charles III for new coinage.
“The design of that coin face has been something that millions of people will see; even though it's the smallest thing I've made, it's the most replicated,” Jennings says. He goes on to describe the Queen Elizabeth II statue as a completely different job, and a huge responsibility.
“It'll be a large piece of work in an extremely sensitive spot. A lot of consideration needs to be given to the location, the meaning of the location and how we develop it to commemorate her suitably,” he says.
Some of Jennings’s most prominent pieces include a statue of the writer George Orwell at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London (2017), the Crimean war nurse Mary Seacole sited outside St Thomas’s Hospital in London (2016) and the poet John Betjeman at St Pancras station (2007).
Prior to this, for a number of years, Jennings carved inscriptions for memorials and crafted architectural inscriptions for churchyards, cathedrals and colleges. “I increasingly built up figurative portraiture initially, [I made] small bass reliefs and then larger figures, and then finally public commissions [such as Orwell]. Maybe it's some kind of throwback to my time at university studying literature,” he says.
More details, including information about Jennings’s final design, are due to be revealed next year.
