sculpture
Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797 from complications giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. She died young.
Wollstonecraft led an extraordinary and difficult life in the turbulent times of the late eighteenth century. It is her equally extraordinary response to life experience through her writings which endures, and places her as a foundational figure of European Feminism.
For any of you unfamiliar with her political context, it was one in which White men were making a wholly exclusive claim to rights in the French and American Revolutions, where that language of rights was about defining our specific modern conception of the human being as having an inalienable value.
'She made the revolutionary claim (at a time when women were still the property of men) that women were the intellectual equals of men and should also be accorded equal rights, and thereby personal liberty and freedom.' Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans
But it gets even more interesting.
Wollstonecraft was the first to insist on an inclusive definition of equality - that equal rights were not merely for a privileged minority. Equal rights were for all, equally: 'equality', by its very nature, must be a universal principle - or else it is not equality at all. And once 'equality' is asserted as universal, the logical outcome is that 'liberty' - freedom - is as well. Hence, for those who exclude others from humanity, they deny that very humanity to themselves: 'For all the advantages of civilisation cannot be felt, unless it pervades the whole mass' Wollstonecraft; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
In this way, she forced a revolutionary redefinition of what it is to be a human being - that our humanity is indivisible. This is her extraordinary heritage. She made all of us matter: a universal sui generis. She has provided the theoretical underpinnings for all liberation movements since.
The explosive consequences of what Wollstonecraft started in 1792 are still playing themselves out before us, whether in the Black Lives Matter movement, or in the 2022 constitutional disaster of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade. She couldn't be more urgently relevant now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
Context
Martin Jennings FRSS is my partner. He produced a small competition maquette of a statue of Wollstonecraft some years ago. https://martinjennings.com
Autumn 2020, he was contacted by many women who asked him to move forward with making the full-size version, as there is currently no statue of her in the public realm. One of these women was Sarah-Louise Jordan. She set up a successful Crowdfunder to raise money for the second stage of the project: the quarter-scale maquette (50cm). https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/statue-for-mary-wollstonecraft
After considered reflection, Martin handed the project to me.
I prepared at length for this work. I re-read the Vindication and a few other books to refresh my memory of her writings and thought. I communicated with a knowledgeable and incisive female art historian about previous representations of Wollstonecraft who made a considerable difference to the outcome, as well as many others. I researched the period clothes in detail and Wollstonecraft's own preferences (she always insisted on wearing a corset whatever the time of day). I looked to the traditions in art history for compositional inspiration. Martin's competition maquette was the most important thing; it already possessed all elements for a successful public sculpture: strong pyramidal composition; architecture; pose; expression; public amenity.
Martin Jennings's competition maquette
I have very strong personal/political feelings about the work – studying Wollstonecraft's political thought at college in some depth had an enormous impact on me and her inspiration has been a constant in my life since. But the technical, intellectual and primarily visual rigours of my profession stand paramount. I also believe that the best art comes from sustained dialogue with my peers - both dead and alive – where constant discussions with Martin and other colleagues about this particular sculpture (and sculpture in general) are written all over this work.
The sculpture Itself
Quarter-scale maquettes are essential. The purpose of small competition-scale maquettes is to give a general idea; second stage quarter-scale maquettes are for exploring, developing and resolving form and content. If this stage is missed before making the full-scale sculpture (in the case of this statue of Wollstonecraft, of seven feet in height), the work suffers: the thinking hasn't been done and as sculptures get larger, proportions must change. That is why digital enlargement from competition-scale maquettes doesn't work. At each scale, there are internal armatures beneath the clay: at full-scale, welded steel and metal mesh. Shifting and developing the sculpture at full-scale is therefore highly restricted, and if attempted, usually makes an unresolvable mess.
My main contribution to Martin's competition maquette was introducing the element of interruption. This theme plays itself out in the sculpture in multiple ways. Why is she standing there?
John Opie's first portrait of her was painted during the time of Wollstonecraft writing her most famed work, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' 1792 (aged 33). Tate Gallery London
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. Nonetheless, there is also unease: 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 reinforces the effect of gravity on form whilst simultaneously creating a sense of movement (Cf Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space); it provides compositional 'framing'; suggests 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 Rodin's Balzac and Hogarth's self-portrait) 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 painted 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.
John Opie's second portrait of Wollstonecraft was on her marriage to Godwin 1797. She is pregnant with Mary Shelley in this portrait and subsequently died in giving birth to her. National Portrait Gallery
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 harmonic rhythm of pyramids. Pyramids focus energy: at the centre of the pyramids is the quill: the act of human agency.
The last major decision I made was to put her in black. This was to honour the more 'masculine' portrait made by John Williamson, where it is likely she was dressed this way to make a specific point of asserting her equal worth at the regular dinner debates (largely comprising men) at her publisher's house. The sculpture becomes increasingly black towards the base.
John Williamson portrait. Painted around the time of her sensational 'A Vindication of the Rights of Men' 1790 (aged 31). Walker Art Gallery
I decided to make the bench out of bronze for numerous reasons: fewer problems with vandalism and maintenance; continuity of materials between figure and architecture to unite them; above all, so that when people sit on the bench, they will polish the top surface (effectively they will be sitting on knowledge – the bench is made up of stacks of books protruding at its 'book-ends'), thus bringing the mark of the living to the sculpture.
This is only a brief account of some of my thoughts and decisions on this work. A good sculpture is more than the sum of its parts, but all the same I've decided to talk in this way about it because not enough is written by actual makers about what they are doing, how they do it and why. Others will find all manner of things in the work – that's also the point. To put a work out into the world, it is no longer one's own.
I also want to talk about what the end result can be when the actual modelling isn't subcontracted by the artist (which is increasingly the case in public statues), but made by herself, where every single minute of the making, one is forced into a multitude of decisions. It produces a unified whole where there is an inherent sense that a specific human being generated it, mirroring the representation of a specific human being. I believe an audience can instinctively 'see' this without any knowledge of complex process, even if they can't quite put their finger on why. I don't think this sense is necessary in all sculpture, particularly schematic work. But in a statue of a specific human being, I would argue that it has a critical importance.
Honesty in sculpture - as in just about all else - is in the total transparency of process and actively attributing work where it is due. And I think talking about process makes anything more interesting because just about all human beings by nature possess a deep drive (homo faber) to 'make' in every field of work: we want to know how something is done. It's our love of story. With bronze-cast sculpture, a modeller's work truly stands and falls on the foundry. It is a truly collaborative narrative.
I finished the quarter-scale maquette in late January 2022 after nine months' work. I was assistant in the casting from the clay to Dorota Rapacz - a great artist in her own right, but also an exceptional professional caster – as it was too complex for me on my own. Next, Pangolin Editions in Stroud made fantastic work of digitally fabricating the bench, inscriptions and hard landscaping. This foundry is an extraordinary nexus of the finest and rarest skills: cutting edge technology, mind-boggling engineering and high artistry.
Exhibition of Wollstonecraft Maquette
I submitted this maquette to the annual international competition of the Society of Portrait Sculptors in March for exhibition in August and met with success.
https://www.portrait-sculpture.org/open-exibition-face2022
Thank you to all those who contributed to this project on Crowdfunder; I am grateful for the support of so many. Most thanks are deserved by the inspirational Sarah-Louise Jordan who set up the Crowdfunder and got the ball rolling. Without her, this sculpture never would have happened.
This project has embodied the best of bringing people together; solidarity, a core principle of the Feminist Movement, has been the driving force of how we have got to where we are now. It pays best tribute to Wollstonecraft herself.
John Keenan's portrait. Painted by him probably whilst she was in Ireland being a governess, around the time of the publication of her 'Thoughts on the Educations of Daughters' 1787 (aged 28). Private collection.
For this reason, some people are worth commemorating publicly, not for idol worship, but because their challenge to us continues - to widen the scope of our imaginations of what is possible in the world beyond our own limits. Wollstonecraft herself was profoundly human in her flaws. She lived and died - she was neither a set of ideas nor sculpture. A public statue of Wollstonecraft is a visual means by which we meet her many imaginations with our own.
The public commemoration of an individual is profoundly problematic. But to refuse it altogether smacks of a dangerous literalism. Notwithstanding its difficulties, the best of such public commemoration is an act of solidarity in itself: it is a powerful material stamp on our culture that the agency of individuals does matter, and endures. It couldn't be more apt in Wollstonecraft's case, as this was at the very core of her thought. That's the point of equality as an idea: we all matter. And some of us still have a dream of what humanity might become with it. Primarily, more humane.
The Full-Scale Statue of Wollstonecraft
The former president of the Supreme Court, Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, has taken up the role of guiding patron for this project. The next stage is to create a working committee to actively fundraise for the full-scale statue. If you have interest in supporting this project, please get in touch.