Thomas J. Price

Thomas J. Price (born c.1981) is a British sculptor of the YBA school. Reaching out (2020), Price’s first individual full figure representation of a woman, is currently on show between Bow and West Ham, on art trial The Line, London. Price has also been selected to create an artwork to be unveiled in 2021 commemorating the Windrush generation for Hackney Town Hall.[1]

Thomas Price at the unveiling of his sculpture 'Reaching Out'
Photo Linda Nyland/Guardian

Price who is 39, studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. There have been major exhibitions of his work at the National Portrait Gallery and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, [1] and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto.

Reaching Out

The statue is 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and weighing 420 kilograms, she is also strikingly ordinary. The work is deliberately not based on any particular woman – an antidote to hero worshipping. She is depicted on her mobile phone. Thomas Price says “I want this sculpture to be an opportunity for people to connect emotionally with an image of someone they might not have noticed before,” Price said.[2]

It has been installed on Three Mills Green near Stratford, east London, and is part of The Line, the city’s only dedicated public art walk, which follows the Greenwich meridian.[2]

This is only the third statue in the United Kingdom of a black woman, and the first by a black sculptor. The other two are the one of Mary Seacole outside St Thomas’s hospital and a representation of black motherhood in Stockwell. Reaching Out would have been the fourth if the artist Marc Quinn had succeeded in persuading authorities in Bristol to keep his pop-up sculpture of Jen Reid, the Black Lives Matter protester, longer than 25 hours.[2] Prior to the imposition of Quinn's piece, Price had been invited by TIME to contribute an article discussing the legacy of colonial monuments and the removal of the Colston statue. Within the article, Price noted "White artists are putting themselves forward to create replacement sculptures of slave owners with no sense of irony. That’s a saviour complex, and that exemplifies what is wrong, when even the solution doesn’t involve the Black experience."[3]

See also

References
  1. Thorpe, Vanessa (19 July 2020). "Sculptor unveils 'black everywoman' as UK row over statues and race grows". The Observer. Retrieved 19 July 2020.
  2. Brown, Mark (5 August 2020). "Sculptor's black 'everywoman' erected on public art walk in London". the Guardian. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
  3. Price, Thomas (June 17, 2020). "Taking Down Statues Isn't Enough. We Need to Radically Rethink How We Celebrate Power". Suyin Haynes. Time Magazine. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  4. Kilb, Andreas. "Kino: "Berlin Alexanderplatz": Über den Rand der deutschen Wirklichkeit". FAZ.NET (in German). Retrieved 19 July 2020.
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