Nicole Wassall
What's Left Unsaid - Thomas More, 2014
Black and white digital print
30 x 42 cm
11 3/4 x 16 1/2 in
11 3/4 x 16 1/2 in
Copyright The Artist
Part of an ongoing project, where over 20 statues have been gaged and photographed in central London. A suspicion that, before long, there would be less tolerance for artists in...
Part of an ongoing project, where over 20 statues have been gaged and photographed in central London.
A suspicion that, before long, there would be less tolerance for artists in Lycra climbing and gaging statues prompted this project into action, and for a while this was the case. Then lockdown opened new opportunities to ‘exercise’ and I found myself revisiting the project. Demonstrators pulled a statue down and I felt similar themes being visited. No statues were harmed in the making of this collection, but people stopped, looked and asked who the characters were.
Thomas More, the inspiration for this project, sits in black robes with gold face and hands. More was killed for ‘treason’, in truth he was killed because he wouldn’t bend to indulge Henry VII. He believed his daughter as wise as any man, encouraging her education, and he coined the phrase Utopia with a book of that name.
Utopia (1516) depicts a pagan island governed by reason. It provided a cure for egoism; his reaction to a world he saw governed (and divided) by self-interest and greed. The book covered ideas on punishment, education, multi-religion society, women’s rights and was the first in a new genre of books.
A suspicion that, before long, there would be less tolerance for artists in Lycra climbing and gaging statues prompted this project into action, and for a while this was the case. Then lockdown opened new opportunities to ‘exercise’ and I found myself revisiting the project. Demonstrators pulled a statue down and I felt similar themes being visited. No statues were harmed in the making of this collection, but people stopped, looked and asked who the characters were.
Thomas More, the inspiration for this project, sits in black robes with gold face and hands. More was killed for ‘treason’, in truth he was killed because he wouldn’t bend to indulge Henry VII. He believed his daughter as wise as any man, encouraging her education, and he coined the phrase Utopia with a book of that name.
Utopia (1516) depicts a pagan island governed by reason. It provided a cure for egoism; his reaction to a world he saw governed (and divided) by self-interest and greed. The book covered ideas on punishment, education, multi-religion society, women’s rights and was the first in a new genre of books.