2020 has been a big year for mistakes, and, far from being an exception, the art world has been an exceptional place for them. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Society is in crisis, culture is under the microscope, and it has been a really bad year for sculptures. A public sculpture was in the headlines again – the end product of a long campaign to erect a statue in celebration of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of proto-feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who died in 1797.

It’s safe to say that the sculpture does not bear resemblance to Wollstonecraft or her philosophies, which maintained that women should be treated as equal and rational human beings, not ornaments. In its size and placement, Hambling’s female figurine is painfully ornamental.

Yesterday I enjoyed a hilarious comparison between the sculpture, designed and created by Maggi Hambling, and a naked barbie doll emerging messily from a kebab. How can somebody misjudge something this badly?

I suppose what makes it worse is that it wasn’t just ‘somebody’ – this sculpture was chosen by a committee as the winner of a competition that 10,000 people entered. I do wonder what the other entries were like for this nudie nymph kebab to have even been competitive. I can’t imagine many things that would have looked worse to the not-so-late, great Mary Wollstonecraft – and the artist and the statue committee’s defence was, bafflingly, that the statue is not ‘of’ Mary, but ‘for’ her.

Art is often misunderstood. But my personal reaction, and the numerous prolific feminist voices that have validated it, tell me that the critical public backlash against Hambling’s statue is not rooted in a misunderstanding. I feel like the problem is not that the sculpture is misunderstood, but that it (or its sculptor, or maybe everyone on the selecting committee) misunderstands.

Hambling argues that she has to be naked because clothes define people. Clothes are limiting. She is missing the very crucial and sad point that nudity also defines people, especially when said people are women, and when said women are objectified every day.

Nudity is arguably even more limiting, especially since Wollstonecraft’s writing was revolutionary and exceptional exactly because it pushed against the conventions of a certain historical moment. Sculpting her as Everywoman, naked and unidentifiable, stripped of clothes, context, identity, is reductive, and the sculpture feels detached from both Wollstonecraft and her legacy.

The claim that it represents her ‘spirit’ in relation to the present moment is also unconvincing - the sculpture is far removed from the women whose equality feminism still fights for, very few of whom have the thin frame, toned tummy, and pert breasts of Hambling’s ‘Everywoman’.

Somewhere along the line of this £143,000 (!) creation process, the culmination of a decade-long campaign, there has been a misunderstanding.

This sculpture does not understand that there is a hypocrisy to labelling a barbie-like nude as an ‘Everywoman’ figure. It does not understand that today’s feminism is more diverse and intersectional than ever before. Mary’s spirit and passion for equality is still alive in feminists today, and this sculpture does not understand that a tiny, nondescript nude has got no chance at capturing a legacy of this scope and depth.

I appreciate that it tries to make a break from traditional memorialising modes, and the Victorian tradition of simply putting people on a pedestal. I respect that this was an attempt to memorialise Mary Wollstonecraft in a radical and interesting way. But although Hambling’s sculpture is certainly different, it is unimaginative. Its nudity is not pure and it is not all-encompassing; it still gratifies the beauty standards that we are all tired of. This could have been so much better.

Words: Alice Keeling

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