Predictably, a black woman occupying one of Britain’s most conspicuous public pedestals has generated fury from parts of the far right (Photo: @LDN_Culture / X)
Tschabalala Self’s new sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, in the heart of London, has predictably enraged parts of the right.
But Lady in Blue deserves more than being defended against racists. It is a joyous, funny and formally powerful work of art.
A huge black woman in a brilliant blue dress strides across the Fourth Plinth.
The ten-foot bronze sculpture, unveiled on 10 September, is Self’s version of an ordinary woman. She is deliberately not a monarch, general or national hero. As Self puts it, she is not “a historic figurehead to commemorate” but a woman walking towards a shared future.
Trafalgar Square is full of imagery of empire, military victory and state power. Into that landscape Self has inserted someone who is monumental simply because she exists. And she does not stand obediently still. She walks.
The movement is crucial to why the sculpture works. The Fourth Plinth is long enough for Self to turn it into a stage. The woman stretches across it rather than merely sitting on top of it. One leg emerges dramatically from the dress, her platform shoe planted ahead of her, while the whole body seems to follow.
Born in Harlem in 1990, Self made her reputation principally as a painter. She builds figures out of painted canvas, printed material, fabric and stitching. Bodies are pieced together almost like collages—exaggerated, shifted and reconstructed rather than subordinated to conventional anatomical proportion.
The gigantic leg, broad hips, relatively small head and outstretched hands do not aim at classical naturalism. They make the body more expressive. Self takes those physical characteristics through which black women have historically been stereotyped, sexualised and subjected to scrutiny and turns them into the source of the figure’s authority.
Against the greys and browns of Trafalgar Square, the luminous blue dress is absurdly vivid. Its association with lapis lazuli deliberately connects it with one of the most precious pigments in the history of European painting.
Behind the sculpture stands the National Gallery, full of paintings in which costly ultramarine was used for the clothes of saints, aristocrats and the Virgin Mary.
Predictably, a black woman occupying one of Britain’s most conspicuous public pedestals has generated fury.
Online comments have complained that the sculpture insults “white culture”. They have demanded its destruction because Britain is supposedly an “Anglo Saxon country”.
They have asked whether London has become Africa and dismissed the figure as another product of “DEI”—Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. Those aren’t arguments about proportion, bronze casting or whether the sculpture suits the square. They are arguments about whether a black woman belongs there at all.
Self has encountered this before. Her 2022 sculpture, Seated, on display in Bexhill-on-Sea, was attacked, with white paint sprayed over the figure’s black skin.
Self described the attack as racist. Her response was to organise a public restoration. Some 300 people queued to help clean it.
Statues of admirals and monarchs are so familiar that they can appear politically neutral. Put an unknown black woman on one pedestal for two years and suddenly we are told that public sculpture has become political.
It would therefore be easy to praise Lady in Blue simply because racists hate it. That would sell the work short.
Her sculpture succeeds because its politics have become physical—in the forward step, the exaggerated body, the polished skin, the ridiculous, magnificent shoes, the dazzling blue and the woman’s complete lack of deference towards the monumental world around her.
There is humour in it, but also confidence and sensuality. She is neither a suffering victim nor a solemn representative of an oppressed group. She enjoys having a body and occupying space.
Tschabalala Self has put an ordinary woman up there—and made her too busy walking into the future to notice the people shouting after her.
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