Capital Women: London’s statues of the ‘fairer sex’ by Juliet Rix

Introducing the sixth series of Discovering Women Sculptors, this talk will discuss statues by women sculptors in London and expand the topic to cover the statues of women in the Capital included in her book, London Statues of Women (Safe Haven Books) which was published this summer. These women, many of whom have only been commemorated with statues in recent years, are ‘an extraordinary and varied band with exceptional tales to tell’. The talk will range across some remarkable characters represented by accomplished sculptors, from Gillian Wearing’s Millicent Fawcett (the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square) and Maggi Hambling’s controversial Mary Wollstonecraft memorial, to WWII spies and a ‘poetical’ mathematician, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth I, as well as statues commemorating ‘ordinary people’ in war and peace.

Juliet Rix is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. After a degree in history of art at Cambridge, she worked for the BBC in television then radio, including a couple of years as a foreign correspondent before settling into freelance life in London. She works for the Telegraph, Guardian, Times, and online art magazine Studio International, among others.