Millicent Fawcett

A statue by British artist Gillian Wearing OBE of leading Suffragist campaigner Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in Parliament Square in 2018. This monument is the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square, and the first to be created by a woman. Its unveiling on 24 April 2018 was a major event in the Mayor of London’s #BehindEveryGreatCity campaign, which celebrates the role of women in the capital. The statue is a contemporary depiction of Millicent Fawcett at the age of 50, when she became president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The new work presents Fawcett’s individual courage as part of a collective struggle. Alongside Fawcett, the names and portraits of 58 men and women who campaigned for women’s suffrage are inscribed on the plinth.

The making of the work began with an invitation to a number of artists to make proposals for which a panel was convened for the selection. Following this process Gillian Wearing was invited to develop her proposed statue of Millicent Fawcett. The making of the work was managed by the Contemporary Art Society and was a highly technical project that required technology not yet available on the market and input from specialists across the UK including 3D modellers, activists, historians, costumers, the Fawcett Society and the bronze foundry to create a work that marries up ancient and state of the art techniques to produce a work that will stand for hundreds of years.

About the artist
Gillian Wearing CBE, RA (born 10 December 1963) is an English conceptual artist, one of the Young British Artists, and winner of the 1997 Turner Prize. In 2007 Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Wearing is known for her method of documentation of everyday life through photography and video, concerning individual identity within the private and the public spaces, where Wearing blurs the line between reality and fiction.

Commissioned by the Mayor of London with 14-18 NOW, Firstsite and Iniva to commemorate the Centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, through the Government’s national centenary fund