Echoes across the Green - Asides (XIV)

 

It's taken me a few months, but yesterday I got my first physical look at Maggi Hambling's A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft. Of course, I'd already seen an image of the piece and listened with interest - and strained ambivalence - to the arguments that have raged around its aesthetic and intention. Is it - like Hambling insists - a depiction of an everywoman, or, does the nakedness of the figure on top of the mound betray a lazy objectification of the female form? I was not swayed by either of those interpretations. What I did know, though, was that the sculpture did not strike me as beautiful. I struggled to cast aside the image of a pig's carcass that had been sprayed silver and then had a child's doll placed upon a gnarled hind leg. 

"I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves."

But then I looked more closely. Or rather more widely. And what I did notice - and it's illustrated perfectly in the photograph - is the way that Hambling's work echoes against the building in the background, the chimney stack mirroring the naked figure atop the silvery amorphous mass. It didn't seem like an accident. Sure enough - and I'd seen the green plaque proclaiming this before - the building was the site of Wollstonecraft's school for girls that she set up with her sister Eliza in 1784. The power of the sculpture grew. It wasn't standing alone, it was part of a conversation - and one which appeals greatly to this university fundraiser - about the fundamental importance of education for all. And with that, the beauty of the sculpture revealed itself, its message not frozen and confined within the bounds of form, but rather stretching out and up into the immediate sky.