Thinking about how we publicly celebrate or memorialise women’s achievements has changed – but not in pace with contemporary art practice. The highly figurative bronze statue is such a relic of a colonial patriarchy, and yet it is still often the go-to kind of representation in the public square. Replacing figurative statues of colonists and enslavers with more figurative statues is timid, and so reductive. We can do so much better than erecting supersized dolls on plinths outside post offices and shopping malls.
New work such as Khaleb Brooks’s shell sculpture The Wake, mentioned in your editorial (The Guardian view on statues: new monuments reflect changing values and reinvigorate the public realm, 1 August), don’t just commemorate a past, they declare a now agreed truth that was once obscured by the powerful.
