‘This statue has a bigger story to tell’
As Parliament Square gets its first female statue, after a Telegraph campaign, Rosa Silverman talks to its creator Gillian Wearing
What might aliens think of British society if they landed in our capital city and judged us by our civic statues alone? It is a question that has long troubled Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and creative industries, who quips: “They’d conclude that we mainly travel around on horseback and that we’re all blokes.” Perhaps not for much longer. Today, the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square will be unveiled.
A bronze of the suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, it was created by Gillian Wearing; a Turner Prizewinning artist and also now the first woman to have produced a statue in the historic square. To date, the area directly opposite our seat of democracy – and one of London’s main tourist attractions – has been home to 11 statues of men, all designed by men.
The monument came about following a campaign by activist Caroline Criado Perez (who had previously lobbied to put Jane Austen on the new £10 note) and The Daily Telegraph, which published an open letter to Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor, in May 2016. It called for a statue celebrating suffrage to be placed in Parliament Square in 2018 to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some women in Britain the vote for the first time, and was backed by Emma Watson, JK Rowling and others.
Wearing, a feminist who has previously described her working method as “editing life”, declares herself to have been surprised by the lack of female statues. “Until someone launched a campaign, it wasn’t going to organically appear,” she says. “Women form half the population yet there’s no representation.”
Ahead of the anticipated unveiling, in a small room near the top of City Hall, she has met Simons – chairman of the Suffragette Statue Commission that selected her as the woman for the job – to look back at the journey that started in The Telegraph and has led them to this point.
Wearing, 54, who is dressed in Barbour jacket, jeans and trainers, admits she was “amazed” to have been selected. One of the so-called Young British Artists who dominated the art scene in the Nineties, she is known for her conceptual pieces and, she says, had “never actually done historical work. I didn’t imagine I was going to get [the commission] to be honest. I thought I wouldn’t be in the running. Then I got a call to say I was on the shortlist – and was the only one on the shortlist – and that was fantastic.”
For Simons and her team, Wearing’s status as a contemporary artist made her all the more suitable for the job. “A lot of the bronze pieces
‘I hope it makes people feel this is how movements can bring about change’
you see, there’s not much contemporary perspective on them,” Simons reflects.
The challenge for Wearing, then, was to create something for a historical square already populated with historical pieces (other statues there include Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Benjamin Disraeli and Nelson Mandela), and make it relevant. The resulting bronze “really did nail that”, says Simons. Fawcett, who led the movement for women’s suffrage in Britain, has been cast with a banner in her hands. “Courage calls to courage everywhere,” read the words inscribed upon it, taken from a speech she gave following the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who was trampled by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913.
Why this slogan in particular? “It’s open-ended, so it can make you think about your own perspective,” says Wearing. “You want to bring people in and not make them feel as if they’re distant to it. I think ‘courage calls to courage’ opens up your imagination and makes you think about what it can mean, but it’s also a rallying cry,” she adds.
Not only this, but it brings into the mix the suffragettes. “Millicent was anti-militant, but she wrote those words after Davison’s death and it was her way of acknowledging that the suffragettes were also very important,” says Wearing. “Including them on the banner was a way of acknowledging both the suffragettes and suffragists.”
Controversy surrounded the choice of Fawcett for the statue, with some calling for a more recognisable figure such as Sylvia Pankhurst – a leader of the suffragette movement, which was willing to use violence in the fight for the vote. Fawcett, by contrast, was a suffragist who founded the National Union of Women’s Suffrage and preferred to lobby peacefully. Those behind the statue have argued that her tireless work represents the long, arduous battle for the 1918 Act – and subsequent 1928 Act, giving every woman in Britain the vote and which Fawcett only just lived to see, dying in 1929 aged 82.
Yet, this is not a monument to just one woman; it is intended to represent Fawcett’s individual courage as part of a collective struggle. Look at the plinth and you will see a border, around the top, composed of 59 laser-etched images of other women and men who fought for the Representation of the People Act, which marked its centenary on February 6.
This had not been the original plan. “There were so many different people involved,” explains Wearing. “I remember going away on a trip to Copenhagen and having a panic moment, thinking this is the only time we can have a lot of people commemorated in a public place and we’re just having suffragists, so it will feel like I’m leaving out a lot of people and there’s a bigger story to be told. This is my chance to be more inclusive. And that’s when I decided to incorporate suffragettes as well.”
Back in the UK, she sat down with a team of experts and together they drew up a list. “It was so hard because it couldn’t include everyone, as the plinth is not huge,” she says. “But we tried to get a cross-section of different parts of Britain.” That includes one working-class suffrage speaker called Jessie Craigen, for whom no photograph exists. Her tile will be left blank.
While Wearing insists that the most important thing about the statue “is it’s about Millicent Fawcett, the suffragists and suffragettes, and not about me” one subtle detail reflects her role as artist. For the hands clasping the banner are, in fact, her own. “When I was searching through photographs of Fawcett, looking for the right clothes and details, I noticed she had a similar wedding band to me,” says Wearing. “I thought, my hands are around a similar age – she was a little bit older than me at the age she’s portrayed
– so I’ll use my hands.”
The result is a powerful and evocative piece. What effect does Wearing hope it will have when seen by the public for the first time this week? “I hope it’s very inspiring,” she says. “I hope it makes people feel that this is how movements can come together and bring about change. In situations like these, you realise it has to be a large group of people that changes things; change doesn’t get handed to you on a plate.”
As for Simons and those hypothetical aliens landing in London, she has high hopes for the power of Wearing’s statue to bring about a change of its own. “My hope is it starts a conversation about redressing the balance of gender in statues, and about visibility,” she says. “We need to see ourselves in these public spaces. Otherwise we’re only telling half a story.”