With just 17% of statues in the UK depicting women and only 2% dedicated to people belonging to ethnic minorities, there is a clear need for more varied representation in public art. Luckily, one local artist is looking to change this in Nottingham, whilst also representing the long and diverse history of our city’s textile industry.
Standing In This Place, a sculpture by Rachel Carter will be erected in the Green Heart park in February. We asked Rachel to tell us more about the piece, how she became an artist, and what it’s like to work as a sculptor.
I was born in Heanor and I’ve always lived on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, but I've lived on the Nottinghamshire side for most of my life.
Art was not something I had set out to do when I was at school, I knew I enjoyed making things with my hands and loved lessons in woodwork and metal work. However, my teacher at the time suggested that taking woodwork for GCSE would not be suitable as I was a girl. He felt it would not be fair on the boys as he felt he would have to give more time to teaching a girl! Being quite a shy child, I instead chose cookery and went off to catering school to begin a life in hotel management.
In 2000 I saw an advert for an AS level in fine art at Nottingham College. This rekindled the love of making, and the AS-level became a full A-level, then onto a foundation degree, and then a degree. I think that the tutors at Nottingham College must've seen something in me and encouraged me to follow this passion for creating. 24 years later, I'm still creating.
Since graduating from the Sustainable Applied Arts degree I have been driven by the application of hand weaving processes to create intricate textures and forms for sculpture. I’ve been using the lost wax casting technique and collaborating with Pangolin Editions foundry over the last ten years of my career to push the boundaries of this craft form, combining historic textile techniques with new digital technologies.
Many of my commissions are underpinned by a love of history. I see the opportunity to represent our shared and complex histories within sculpture as an honour. Looking at my own ancestry often provides inspiration for new work, adding to a long legacy of weavers, knotters and makers that stretch back over 350 years of the East Midlands industrial heritage.
I often wonder when walking through areas, like the Lacemarket, what it would've been like for my great great grandma, a lacemaker in the 1800s, or further back for my four times great grandfather, a framework knitter. What processes they used, would it be that different to the ones that I use to create intricate textures? What would I ask them? What would their lives have been like?
Questions like these have definitely inspired my latest piece of work titled Standing In This Place, which looks at the cotton connection. Framework knitters and lace makers were heavily reliant on raw cotton supplies being imported from areas of the world that were dependent on enslaved labour.
I often wonder after I'm gone, if my work will still remain in our city, and which bit will be shiny from decades of human touches.
During lockdown, I responded to a volunteer post to help the Black-led community group the Legacy Makers to research cotton spinning mills of the Midlands. We were discovering where the working-class millworkers like my own ancestors migrated from to work in this industry.
During this project, I saw the connection of my ancestors to the ancestors of the Legacy Maker's community, who may have been enslaved. We discovered we were two descendent communities coming together to discover the story of cotton. This story felt so powerful and personal that four years later, we are still working together and about to bestow a gift to the city of Nottingham. A life-size bronze statue of two women, a white mill worker/lace maker, and a Black enslaved woman uprooted to the Americas.
Working in bronze is a very time-consuming medium as your work passes through multiple phases from concepts and sketchbook work to creating scale models. Working with the foundry is so inspiring, to walk around the foundry floor and see works of art in production from some of the most amazing artists of our time is so special. From the first piece of bronze that I cast back in 2014 to this one, every single piece has such unique qualities, but one of the things that I love about bronze is how it traces the touch of the human hand. Every time somebody caresses an area of the sculpture, we slowly rub away the protective coating and replace it with oils from our own skin. Over years touching from human hands creates shiny patches, like the Robin Hood sculpture that sits outside the castle. I think they have to repaint the top of his head every ten years, everybody wants to caress the top of his head, and he gets a very shiny patch. I often wonder after I'm gone, if my work will still remain in our city, and which bit will be shiny from decades of human touches.
I find it fascinating to read about other artists, such as the late great Barbara Hepworth, to hear her struggles as a female artist, bringing up four children and the decisions she made resonates with myself as a mother of two. People often ask me, ‘Have you always known you wanted to be an artist?’ and I always respond in the same way. I've never known what I wanted to do with my life that was never clear, but what was clear to me is that I wanted to make with my hands, and it just happened to be sculpture.
Head along to the unveiling of Standing in This Place by Rachel Carter in the Green Heart park on Sunday 9 February. Speak Her Name, an exhibition delving into the lives of one hundred historic women, is also open at Ruddington’s Framework Knitters Museum until 31 January.
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