Artist Maggi Hambling has said critics of her naked sculpture commemorating writer and feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft have missed the point.
A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, unveiled today in Newington Green in north London, shows a nude figure emerging from a mixture of female forms.
It immediately attracted criticism, with novelist Jojo Moyes saying: “I think it would have been nice to commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft with her clothes on.
“You don’t see a lot of statues commemorating male political figures without their pants on.”
Fellow writer Imogen Hermes Gower said she hated the “sexy toned female” figure.
She added: “Nameless, nude and conventionally attractive is the only way women have ever been acceptable in public sculpture.”
But Hambling laughed off the criticism, telling the Standard: “You can’t be naked enough can you?
“The point is that she has to be naked because clothes define people. We all know that clothes are limiting and she is everywoman.
“As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.”
She said the critics had confused Wollstonecraft with the figure in the work.
She said: “She’s everywoman and clothes would have restricted her. Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes.
“It’s crucial that she is ‘now’.
“The whole sculpture is called ‘for Mary Wollstonecraft’ and that’s crucially important. It’s not an idea ‘of’ Mary Wollstonecraft naked… the sculpture is for now.”
The work was unveiled after a decade of fund-raising for a monument to the woman who is regarded as one of the earliest feminist pioneers.
Her 1792 work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was one of the texts demanding gender equality.
Hambling, who was made a CBE in 2010, is primarily a painter but is best known for a series of public sculptures, most notably her bust of Oscar Wilde that sits near Charing Cross station.
Another notable work is her 2003 sculpture Scallop which stand in tribute to composer Benjamin Britten on the beach near his home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
Mary Wollstonecraft honoured with statue: In Pictures
