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I actually love this, it reminds me of Metropolis crossed with the birth of Venus.
Oh wow you all really hate this statue.
Here’s why I like it: @maryonthegreen ran a long and amazing campaign to make this happen, they got public support and a huge petition and ended up with two statue suggestions in 2018
Now, why didn’t the statue on the left win? Well when it was announced feminist twitter pointed out it was designed by a man. I mean, I remember watching this entire argument play out on here, it was interesting to see.
and tbh it sucked watching a campaign led by women, being demonised for offering two statues one by a man, one by a woman - if you’ve read MW you know the thing she cared about was equality. So I never got the arguments ‘in her name’, because they didn’t match her actual words.
But this was way back in 2018, two years later it’s here, they went with Maggi, and so we’ve got a statue designed by a woman, from a campaign by women and celebrating one of our most famous female writers. That’s a good thing.
I love it because to me it’s a massive combination of themes, I love the water like a raging wave, I like the mechanical aspect of the figure, it reminds me of how women are created in images that never match their thoughts.
Basically I like that I get to have a mental wank over what it means and what it says. Because isn’t that what art is supposed to be about? Aren’t we supposed to think actual stuff about it?
Can you call it an ‘every woman’? No, clearly not. So I don’t agree with that promotion of it. I don’t see ‘me’ in that figure, but I wouldn’t see ‘me’ in a figurine of a fully dressed Mary either. I just like that it‘s here, and that anyone can interpret it how they want.
And I think all the women behind it worked really fucking hard to make that happen. I get why people are angry with it being nude, but FFS, MW was writing a time when women’s bodies WERE their cages, + here the cage is being freed by a fucking torrential wave of feminist thought?
I don’t know why everyone shouting ‘yuck’ and ‘hate it’ on here has got to me so much... I guess it’s just yet another example of how feminism can never win against itself :/
Does it matter there was a fully dressed Mary plus books offered, but the campaign suffered some really vile harassment over the fact it was designed by a man, and then they went with one of our leading female artists interpretation instead, and everyone still hates it.
Should we even have public art anymore, I guess is my question.
As a final, final thing: isn’t the title of the piece ‘A Sculpture *For* Mary Wollstoncraft’ ...not *of* her. So, just to clarify: everyone‘s upset about the Naked Not Mary, vs the fully clothed but Man Made Mary of 2018. Right?
Okay seriously last thing, but for the ‘feminists’ showing up in my mentions being aggressively negative about how the female figure looks - the shape of its boobs, it’s hair, above AND below. You hate her for how she looks?
...REALLY???
...REALLY???
And obvs twitter scrolling means I see a tweet from fab @Hannah_Greig talking about Mary Shelley’s husband, (MW’s technical son in law) Poet Percy’s memorial being nude, and I kind of love that that keeps it in the family.
