Bronze Controversy: A Belfast landmark

Before my accidental absence from Steemit, I’d posted occasional notes on some Belfast landmarks. I thought I’d pick up where I left off with two ladies I pass morning and evening on my daily commute.

The sculpture, by the terrific Irish artist Louise Walsh, is called Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker. It features two female figures – one older, possible mentor to the younger – whose bodies on closer inspection incorporate the forms of objects associated with lower-paid female labour, such as colanders, typewriters, baskets, coat-hangers, telephones and clothes-pegs.

The sculpture was originally commissioned in the 1980s to stand a few dozen meters away from its current location, in Belfast’s Amelia Street – historically, the town’s red light district. However, Walsh’s refusal to adopt a cartoonish, unchallenging style, choosing instead to foreground the economic forces shaping the sex industry then and now, fell foul of Belfast’s notoriously conservative local government.

A private developer purchased the piece and had it erected on the steps of the nearby railway station, where it remains.

And like a lot of public art, its place seems to grow and evolve, even decay, around it, and the sculpture becomes familiarised, embedded. But if you wait long enough, you’ll see someone notice it afresh and be intrigued.

(An interesting footnote: when the sculpture was being debated in Belfast City Council chambers, one councillor who defended it was Rhonda Paisley, the artist daughter of conservative evangelical firebrand Ian Paisley.)

More details on Wikipedia here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Unknown_Woman_Worker