I had a piece of alabaster in my studio which I had planned to use for something else but was restrained as there was a special white feathery leaf in the corner of the stone which I wanted to keep, that can be made out on the left hand image below. The only thing I could make out was a lady’s head with a bun in her hair. I decided to stay true to the stone and follow what I could see.
I began carving this piece in December 2019 but had to stop due to having the flu and then there was the Covid-19 lock down. I resumed it again in May 2020 when the international news was exploding with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA and the following cascade of BLM events around the globe, including the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol. I had a sense that I was carving a particular woman in history.
I looked on the internet for a woman with a similar appearance to the black woman I had carved and I found the image of Frances Watkins Harper (1825 - 1911) who had a bun, with the same hair line, a smaller nose than most and the same cheek bone structure.
I have discovered the following about her life through reading on line:
Frances Watkins Harper’s first published writing was a pamphlet of poems, called ‘Forest Leaves’. It was rediscovered during the last decade by Johanna Ortner whilst she was researching her Phd. It is believed to be one of the first books published by a black female author in the USA.
The title of her pamphlet of poems ‘Forest Leaves’ linked to the leaf on the shoulder of my sculpture. She was a practising Christian and a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) which was one of the first black churches in the USA (Christianity and Methodism are both connections with myself). She was an abolitionist and refused to ‘give up her seat’ nearly one hundred years before Rosa Parks. She was also a suffragist, co-founding the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 as well as being a teacher, public speaker, and being one of the most prolific African American writers of the 19th Century.
Therefore, this sculpture is named ‘Forest Leaves’ after the first published works of Frances Watkins Harper. I am hoping it will serve as a reminder of the many people who over hundreds of years, and presently through Black Lives Matter Movement, have campaigned and cried out for change and equality. Let that change be now.
Material: Brown Alabaster
Dimensions: 46cm x 40cm x 12cm