Sculpture Information
I have been on such an interesting journey with this piece. Originally, this stone was purchased to be carved into a VW van for a wedding commission. However, in the pre-carved stone, I could see something which looked like a feather or leaf; a dark stem on a lighter base. I could also see a lady’s head with a hair bun at the back of her head. I decided to stay true to the stone and follow what I could see.
As I was carving, I had a sense that this was a particular woman in history. I began carving in December 2019 but had to stop due to having the flu and then the Covid-19 lockdown and resumed it in May 2020. I was carving this piece at the time of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis USA and the growth of the #BLM Movement. I finished the carving in early July.
I looked on the internet for a woman with a similar appearance to the black woman I had carved. I stumbled on 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 was believed to be one of the first black female authors in the USA to have a work published. Her pamphlet of poems was called ’Forest Leaves’. It was discovered during the last decade by Johanna Ortner whilst she was researching her Phd. The title of her pamphlet of poems ’Forest Leaves’ linked to the leaf on the shoulder of my sculpture. She was a practicing Christian and a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E) which was one of the first black churches in the USA. She was an abolitionist and refused to ’give up her seat’ nearly one hundred years before Rosa Parks. She was a suffragist, co-founding the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 as well as being a teacher, public speaker, and 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 for Black Lives Matter and hoping it will serve as a reminder of the many lives which have campaigned and cried out for change and equality for over a hundred years.
