A perfect tribute to an undersung figure, in her rightful place

Abronze statue of a grave and determined-looking middle aged woman bearing a placard that reads “Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere”, Gillian Wearing’s image of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett is the first statue of a woman ever to grace Parliament Square.

It honours a pivotal, but sadly neglected figure, who began her campaigning at 19 in 1866, long before Emmeline Pankhurst. The words are taken from a speech Fawcett gave at the funeral of martyr Emily Davison.

Wearing’s work uses the words to update and subvert the kind of conventional statuary in the square, in images of great male leaders such as Robert Peel and Winston Churchill, employing the spiky humour that made her a leading figure of the YBAS who shook up the British art scene in the Nineties and early Noughties.

Wearing, now 54, is known for photographs of members of the public holding signs that bear statements concerning what’s on their mind. They are lifted above banality by the slightly sinister pathos created in the disjuncture between the appearance of the person and the words they hold. A confident-looking City worker’s reads “I’m desperate”, while a young woman holds up “I hate this world.”

Wearing’s apparently artless formula had an immediate appeal from the moment it first appeared in 1992. Since then, it has been widely parodied and imitated, most recently in a TFL campaign that entirely missed the original’s distinguishing note of dark and subversive humour.

Wearing has revisited the format, with a life-size statue that eschews the pomposity seen in many male statues, and is dignified and convincing. Her best work is typically marked out by a slightly sarcastic whimsicality, but for once she has gone against type and given us a fine sentiment, absolutely straight. And that feels right, in this era-defining image of an undersung figure who is at last taking her place in the pantheon of the country’s great political personalities.

‘For once [Wearing] has gone against type and has given us a fine sentiment, and that feels right’