A Leap of Faith
Danielle Cole
USA
We don’t need another hero. We don’t need another statue funded by the victor reflecting a self-declared glory. Hold any public statue honouring an individual in your minds-eye. Who do you see? Who is missing? Absent are Indigenous people, poor folks, women.
Women have to be Saints, mythological beings or allegorical to earn a space on the podium. The representation of female figures as an abstract concept or fiction saves us from the flaws and failures of the individual. Remove the historical context from behind a statue and you will most often find a story of oppression and privilege.
I chose to use this empty column as a diving board for women to leap joyously away from the past and towards a future of gender equality for all female identified people.
Look closely and you will see a small girl holding a lamb at the bottom of the piece. This is an homage to my 84-year-old, Irish born, mother-in-law who, as a child, was caught pulling a lamb up the stairs of her rural home as she tried to protect it from a downpour. She bears witness to the greater opportunities of future generations of women.
There is a lack of representation of BIPOC people in the materials I use for my work which spans from 1920s-1960s and is sourced from North America. These magazines rarely depicted women of colour, and if they did they either eroticize them or illustrate them is such a way as to reinforce racist stereotypes.
Danielle Cole
USA
We don’t need another hero. We don’t need another statue funded by the victor reflecting a self-declared glory. Hold any public statue honouring an individual in your minds-eye. Who do you see? Who is missing? Absent are Indigenous people, poor folks, women.
Women have to be Saints, mythological beings or allegorical to earn a space on the podium. The representation of female figures as an abstract concept or fiction saves us from the flaws and failures of the individual. Remove the historical context from behind a statue and you will most often find a story of oppression and privilege.
I chose to use this empty column as a diving board for women to leap joyously away from the past and towards a future of gender equality for all female identified people.
Look closely and you will see a small girl holding a lamb at the bottom of the piece. This is an homage to my 84-year-old, Irish born, mother-in-law who, as a child, was caught pulling a lamb up the stairs of her rural home as she tried to protect it from a downpour. She bears witness to the greater opportunities of future generations of women.
There is a lack of representation of BIPOC people in the materials I use for my work which spans from 1920s-1960s and is sourced from North America. These magazines rarely depicted women of colour, and if they did they either eroticize them or illustrate them is such a way as to reinforce racist stereotypes.