Mandela - A Statue To Be Proud Of

Just a few photos of the statues construction.

In June 2020, while my regular work was still all on hold during the Covid-19 ‘Lock-down’ I decided to build a life-size cardboard statue of Nelson Mandela.

Two events, that happened pretty much simultaneously the month before, had sparked this idea off for me. Firstly there was the rise of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement highlighting, amongst other things, the obvious need for schools to introduce more ethnically diverse themes into the curriculum and secondly there was the ongoing debate surrounding some of the UK’s statues and the often ‘inappropriate’ pasts of some of the people who are represented by these.

I decided in light of these events that I wanted to create something that I would donate to a chosen school, a piece of work that would hopefully make a small difference and offer a possible way of initiating further discussion and greater understanding. To me Nelson Mandela was the obvious choice, a strong black role model who fought tirelessly for what he believed in but did so with kindness, empathy and humanity. I reasoned that by creating a statue in his honour the school who displayed it could then use this piece of artwork as inspiration for other ideas and projects, maybe even offer an annual award to a student who had shown particular resilience, tolerance or kindness.

‘Mandela Day’ is celebrated every year on the 18th July, Nelson Mandela’s birthday. This fitted in perfectly with my plans so I chose to create the artwork during the last couple of weeks of June and then I would ask teachers in the UK to nominate their school as the possible ‘winners’ of the statue and I would choose one at random on ‘Mandela Day’ itself.

I decided to call the project “A Statue To Be Proud Of” and I came up with the idea of not initially explaining who would be represented but instead gradually posting photos of the process online which would slowly reveal who the subject of the portrait was. So I started with just the basic shape of the hands and then a sort of cardboard ‘skull’, by the fourth day, when one of the hands became a ‘fist’ some people had begun to figure it out. Each day I added to the online photographs of the statues progress until in early July, after about two weeks, the whole piece was complete.

One of the early posts on Twitter.

I then gave teachers about a week to nominate their schools and by Friday July 17th, the day before ‘Mandela Day’ I had got almost 450 schools on the list. On the day itself I printed out all of the schools, cut the individual addresses out and placed them in a bag, I then shot a short video clip of the statue and of me shaking the bag and selecting the final winner. The winning school was Kelsall Primary School in Cheshire who had been nominated by their Head Teacher David Wearing. I immediately messaged him to let him know and we arranged that I would come up to Cheshire when the Autumn term started and deliver the artwork to the children myself.

Throughout the whole process I received amazing support online from people all around the UK and also many from further afield. Lots of teachers struck up conversations about the positive effect Mandela had had on their lives, some had even visited Robben Island and talked movingly of the memory this had left with them. I also received fantastic messages of support from Christo Brand, who had become friends with Mandela after initially being assigned as one of his prison guards and also from the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa, who not only sent messages of support throughout but also offered to add my project to the database of memorials to Mandela that they keep there to this day. I was incredibly moved and humbled that they might think that something that I had created would be worthy of this honour.

If this project means that one teacher chooses a different, more inclusive book or story to teach, then it will have been a success. If it causes one child to feel more included or represented then I will be happy . . . and if it makes one person take on board some of Mandela’s spirit, kindness, strength and compassion then it will have been worth it . . . and if that person is me, I’ll be overjoyed.

If you want to view more photos of the different stages of the statues construction on Twitter go to the hashtag #AStatueToBeProudOf

One of the messages I received from The Nelson Mandela Foundation, South Africa.