arts and design

The day Bristol woke up to a new statue

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When Bristol went to bed on Tuesday night, the question was theoretical: what should replace the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston?

When it woke up, the answer was concrete – or, at least, resin and steel. Just before five in the morning, a team directed by the artist Marc Quinn had swiftly and almost silently installed a sculpture of Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid, and driven away.

Shortly after the vehicles left, a gaggle of photographers surrounded Reid, who stood with her fist in the air, echoing the picture from the day Colston fell that had inspired the piece in the first place.

“It’s just incredible,” she said, of an artwork that also felt like an ambush. “That’s pretty fucking ballsy, that it is.”

But in offering an answer to one problem, Quinn and Reid presented Bristol mayor Marvin Rees with another one. The installation of the new statue, unsanctioned by the council, was not how the Colston conundrum was supposed to be resolved, Rees told local community radio station BCfm a couple of hours later.

“The subject matter is powerful, a local voice, a remarkable woman being represented,” he said. “All that is fantastic. But Bristol is a very delicately balanced city. A fractured city. So the process is really important, and this hasn’t really worked with the process.”

Despite Rees’ reservations, the statue of Reid – titled ‘A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020’ – now had the same advantage that the Colston one held for more than a century: it was there.

“It almost feels like it’s been there forever,” said Quinn. “It gets under the skin before you understand what it is.”

Jen Reid poses for a photograph in front of a sculpture of herself, by local artist Marc Quinn, on the plinth where the Edward Colston statue used to stand.



Jen Reid poses for a photograph in front of a sculpture of herself, by local artist Marc Quinn, on the plinth where the Edward Colston statue used to stand on 15 July 2020. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

And, as the Colston case proved, the criteria for taking down a public sculpture turn out to be very different to those for putting it up.

Reid, a Bristolian herself, said it had been difficult to keep the secret from friends and family. “When friends say ‘I’ll see you later,’ I think … yeah, you will!”

Gazing up at her mother’s avatar a little later, her daughter Leila shook her head and laughed. “It is incredible seeing it,” she said. “It’s surreal.

From the kneecap to the shape of her hands – it’s just her.” The statue was the right answer to the Colston problem, at least for now, she said. “She’s proud to represent a movement, and if there’s a better way to do that I can’t think of it.”

The police quickly concluded that no crime had been committed, and the statue’s future was a matter for the council. The only official figure was the driver of a road-sweeper, who stopped to take a picture before continuing with his shift. Meanwhile, double-taking passersby and those who had heard the news stopped and stared throughout the day.

“It’s beautiful, and it’s really powerful,” said Shani Ackford, a speech therapist, who had come to see it with her young son. “It’s the right thing to represent how it came down.”

Sanna Bertilsson stopped on her bike to get a picture “before they take it down”.

Others were much less convinced, voicing concerns that a work by an established white artist had occupied a space created by black activism.

Rees noted that Quinn was a “London based artist”, while Quinn said that it was Reid who had “created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air”, and that his role had simply been to “crystallise it”.

Thomas J Price, who has been commissioned to create a sculpture dedicated to the Windrush generation, said he understood the “initial positive reactions” but called it a “votive statue to appropriation”.

Reid, for her part, took the opposite view, though she also expressed her sympathy for Rees. “It’s a demonstrable commitment to the cause of Black Lives Matter in that it shows active allyship,” she said. “Isn’t this what we need? Allies?”

Whatever the answer to that question, the council had a more immediate concern about safety. It sent a structural engineer to assess the installation, and was waiting for their report on Wednesday evening.

Quinn and his team said that they had gone through exactly the same safety assessment that they would have deployed on a commissioned piece. The artist said that it was “not a permanent artwork” – but that it had been placed in such a way that it would be “extremely difficult to move”.

All the same, by the afternoon, Rees had declared that the statue “will have to be removed”.

In the long term, the decision on Colston’s successor will reflect the conclusions of a specially appointed history commission – and, Rees was at pains to say, aim to accommodate even the “people do not get what they want” so that they know “they live in a city that is their one and respects them.”

But Quinn argued that there was scope for a more urgent statement, too: “There are different speeds for different kinds of response,” he said. “If I’m in a position to put something like this up quickly, while the conversation is happening, there’s a duty to do it.”

By the end of the day, it seemed that the statue was going nowhere – for now, at least.

As to what kind of question Bristol will wake up to on Thursday, no one can say. “Once you make an artwork you have no control over it any more,” Quinn said. “I would encourage all artists to take the public realm into their hands, and do things to activate it. We put it there, and now it has its own life.”

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