How does this current moment of statue-toppling – the worldwide activism around the commemoration of history in civic spaces and the demand for truth-telling and more inclusive stories – intersect with ongoing feminist campaigns for public recognition of women’s social, cultural and political contributions? And what role does art play in ‘materialising history’¹ to facilitate the public scrutiny of established narratives, their complication and diversification? These are big and important questions, but in this article, I use recent moves in Australia to commission more statues of significant women to contextualise a discussion of critical artistic approaches to memorialising, focusing on recent work by Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Catherine Bell (b.1969).

The statutory complex

Just as bronze tributes to toxic philanthropists around the world are being tossed into the sea by disgusted crowds reclaiming their right to the city,² a series of campaigns are arguing for the erection of statues to commemorate the civic deeds of significant women and female role models. Among these are Mary on the Green (London),³ the WoManchester statue project (Manchester),⁴ Monumental Women (New York City),⁵ Medusa with the Head Project (MWTH, New York City),⁶ Breaking the Bronze Ceiling (Kentucky)⁷ and A Monument Of One’s Own (AMOOO) in Australia, some of which have already delivered on their key objective: the unveiling of a statue of a woman in their respective cities.⁸

AMOOO, convened by a historian and a journalist, began by counting, that classic feminist art-historical method as practised by The Guerrilla Girls and the more recent local initiative, CoUNTess Project: only 4.3% of Melbourne’s public statues are of women, and of these, 2.8% are symbolic or fictional, 1.5% historical and only 1.4% non-fictional and non-royal. This fuelled the call to action: “We want our cities…to build new statues to new heroes, those who have been previously discounted from our nation’s story and those who can provide role models, inspiration and understanding for generations to come”.⁹ In 2022, AMOOO negotiated its first commission through public consultation and partnerships: a bronze figurative sculpture of equal pay activist Zelda D’Aprano designed by forensic reconstruction artist Jennifer Mann.

This push for gender equality in the memorialisation of women, often instigated by grass-roots campaigns but then frequently coordinated by local government, has had some controversial outcomes, perhaps none as notorious as Mary on the Green’s tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft, another (silvered) bronze figurative statue, unveiled in a north London park in 2020 after decade-long fundraising. The tiny, stereotypical female nude (a young, white, slim figure purportedly standing in for Everywoman according to the artist Maggi Hambling) rising from its base of Rodin-like unmade matter was widely ridiculed as inappropriate to commemorate one of feminism’s founding voices.

‘Performative monuments’ and beyond

It may be difficult to argue with the cause behind these initiatives – although aspirations to gender equality have been subject to feminist critiques for decades – but the perceived failure of several of the outcomes is not particularly surprising. To reach for an outdated artistic form, figurative sculpture, and anachronistic conceptions of civic space, to rely on an outdated artistic material in an age that recognises the egregious implications of extractivism, and to substitute celebration of one individual with that of another, albeit of a different gender, all speak to the inherently conservative nature of these projects. Such approaches, despite being careful to outsource decision-making to community and engage professional artists, also betray an alarming ignorance of the sophisticated work artists, including many informed by feminist perspectives, have undertaken in respect of public commemoration over decades.

Much feminist exploration of public art is specifically concerned with how we might collectively remember and commemorate in more inclusive and expansive ways, from different kinds of community building with an emphasis on contingency to tactics of antagonism, conscious of the need to “go beyond personal levels of comfort and move into spaces full of trepidation so as not to let rallying cries eradicate difference and to listen to the silence that is protest”.¹⁰ Performance studies scholar Mechtild Widrich coined the term ‘the performative monument’ to signal how the general distrust of the very idea of a monument in the 1960s has moved in more recent times towards “a conscious involvement of the person and its architectural surrogates”.¹¹ Such performative approaches recognise that what renders traditional monuments ‘dangerous’ is their assertion of power over public spaces and their assumption of a kind of immortality, contrary to the contingency at the heart of performance. Creating healing spaces, by contrast, might begin from our common ‘insignificance’ and openness to constant becoming.¹²

In her recent book that considers the commemorative demands of the current moment, Widrich moves the focus from individual monuments and their removal or approval to thinking about our spatial surroundings on a broader scale and arguing for different kinds of monuments that might help us to not forget and care collectively.¹³ “If monuments function at all, they do so by materializing history in ways that connect to people, places, times”, writes Widrich, and “not just by recalling memories tied to one privileged site of past events”, nor by “evoking feelings or attitudes connected to one physical material”. She continues, “History materialized in this way requires not just sites and their active use by people, but modes of mediation, technical as well as aesthetic”.¹⁴

This emphasis on how spatial practices, from monuments and architecture to diverse norms or artistic practices, claim space for such history to be seen is a much-needed strategic reorientation. Instead of remaining beholden to redundant models – the bronze figurative statue on the forecourt of a civic building – the possibilities expand to become far more attuned to the multifaceted specificities of commemoration.

Catherine Bell, Crematorium Vessels, 2012–2013, reclaimed florist foam, 19 x 93 x 17 cm, photo: Andrew Curtis © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell, Final Resting Place, 2018–2020, 100 vessels hand-carved from biodegradable florist foam, 100 digital photographs, digital display installation, dimensions variable, photo: Ian Hill © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell, Bringing Daphne Back, 2016, digital collage, 29.7 x 42 cm, photographs of Daphne Mayo working on the Tympanum, Brisbane City Hall were scanned from glass negatives in the Daphne Mayo Collection UQFL 119, Box 8, Folder #3, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library, found images of the Brisbane Town Hall sourced from the internet © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell, Maker Unknown – Margaret Thomas 1840-1929, 2022, hand-carved florist oasis foam, 35 x 23 x 11 cm, photo: Andrew Curtis © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell, Maker Unknown, 2022, live performance in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Melbourne, eight pull up advertising banners, photo: Andrew Curtis © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell, Maker Unknown, 2022, live performance in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Melbourne, eight pull up advertising banners, photo: Andrew Curtis © Courtesy Catherine Bell & Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Catherine Bell’s memorialising practice

For over ten years, Melbourne-based, Brisbane-raised Catherine Bell has been developing a multidisciplinary artistic approach to commemoration in different contexts, weaving insights from feminist, participatory and care perspectives. It is this attention to the links between the materiality of memories embedded in remnants, the central role of care in its many guises in the process of remembering, and broader social and political questions about who and how we collectively commemorate, that makes Bell’s practice distinctive and timely.

Bell undertook her first residency in a healthcare setting in 2012 – a yearlong attachment to Caritas Christi Hospice in Melbourne. Her interest was in exploring how creative practice might most meaningfully alleviate or enhance the experience of this community of patients, loved ones and healthcare staff facing that most singular yet universal, extraordinary yet everyday phenomenon: death. This residency led Bell to discover what would become an enduring material in her practice: floral foam. Bouquets and flower arrangements are material manifestations of human emotion, perhaps no more poignantly than in a hospice or hospital where their colourful and fragrant beauty stands in contrast to clinical affectlessness, where their supposed ‘uselessness’ – their hedonism, frivolity, sensuality – is what gives them purpose. Floral foam also serves surprisingly well as a sculptural material, easy to mould with just a fingernail, yet structurally sound and inexpensive. Bell led workshops that allowed the palliative care community to craft their own small funeral urns, testament to the power of art to materialise memory in relational and contingent ways.

Bell brings the memorialisation of death and her related interest in campaigning for the public recognition of women’s contributions in a recent City of Melbourne project, Maker Unknown (2022). In searching the city’s Public Art and Memorials Collection for traces of work by women artists, Bell was struck by the vast number of Memorial Drinking Fountains scattered throughout the city, most of which are marked as ‘Maker Unknown’. The discovery prompted her to imagine a tribute to Melbourne’s forgotten women sculptors.

Working on a small scale with floral foam, using the city’s public fountains as a design reference, Bell carved eight personalised monuments to commemorate selected women sculptors practicing in Victoria from the 19th to 21st centuries, including Margaret Baskerville (1861–1930), Dora Ohlfsen (1869–1948) and Norma Redpath (1928–2013). These she then photographed and printed on advertising banners, readily housed, and transported in retractable rolls which unfurl to life-sized scale. The final aspect of the work was the unauthorised installation of these material yet ephemeral monuments in public space. Bell chose to perform these rewritings of official civic history in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, a modest tribute to the pioneering women of Victoria built as part of Melbourne’s centenary celebrations in 1934. The artist set up the banner rolls alongside each other on the ground, unfurling each one in turn until they all stood together, then packed them away out of view. Each monument was then individually displayed and carried forward by the artist like a military standard in a sombre ritual. Again, each was stowed away, leaving virtually no trace.¹⁵ A silent protest, but a very eloquent one.

Conclusion

This charged moment in the history of public memorials provides an opportunity to think creatively about how we would like to make histories that speak in inclusive, truth telling voices. Rather than reaching for tired and inherently problematic models that “fail to keep memory alive because [they] externalize the responsibility of remembering onto a physical site and thereby neutralize the affective charge”,¹⁶ we should be questioning the very idea of a monument so as to imagine spaces and stories in states of constant becoming. Art, and in particular approaches grounded in deep knowledge of place whilst also recognising the ephemerality of human life, has a key role to play in exploring new ways of ‘materialising history’.¹⁷