Blog: Mother Vérité: What One Statue Revealed About Society, Policy, Culture

This item is from the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity 

By Marine Tanguy

A new White Paper, Mother Vérité: Postpartum Monumentality in the Visual Public Realm, which I co-wrote with UCL Institute for Global Prosperity researcher Holly Norman, examines what happened when a seven-foot bronze sculpture of a postpartum mother was placed in the streets of London. The paper goes deep into the creative process and the research while this blog draws out the issues I find most urgent: what the sculpture exposed about what our cultural institutions choose to honour, who our cities are designed for, and what our policies still fail to protect.

Mother Vérité stands seven feet tall, cast in bronze, nearly naked, holding her newborn close to her chest. Her postpartum body has not yet returned to what it once was. The artwork has been widely described as the first public statue dedicated explicitly to the postpartum body. 

When Mother Vérité, sculpted by Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark, commissioned by Chelsea Hirschhorn, and delivered by public art agency MTArt, appeared outside the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital in October 2025, and later in Portman Square, Westminster, something unexpected happened. 

What Happened in the Street

People stopped. Strangers talked. A square became something more. Many initial responses were emotional rather than analytical. People hesitated. Some were curious; others visibly uneasy. Several described the sculpture as “too much,” “full on,” or “provocative.” But reactions did not remain fixed. “I went from shock to love,” one person said. Another described it as “provocative at first, but then a relief.”

For a brief period, Portman Square became a truly shared civic space where people debated bodies, care, public art, and what cities are for. 

What Happened Online

The digital images of the statue shared on Instagram were repeatedly hidden behind warnings for “sensitive content.” A static bronze sculpture of a mother holding her baby - silent, immobile, non-sexual - was treated as content requiring caution. 

What It Exposed About Policy

When people stood in front of Mother Vérité, they did not begin by talking about art but about bodies, tiredness, and what recovery after birth actually feels like. About whether there was somewhere nearby to actually sit down, feed a baby, take a breath, or simply pause. 

Public monuments do overwhelmingly reflect the values and priorities of those who historically had the authority to commission them (Spencer-Wood, 2024). Passers-by talked about absence. Where was the everywoman? 

Other questions the statue raised were practical and urgent. Where can someone stop and feed without being hurried on? How do transport systems accommodate slowness, pain, and unpredictability after birth? Such everyday absences have real consequences. They shape whether new mothers remain connected to public life or retreat into isolation, and whether the city feels usable or hostile at precisely the moment when care work intensifies (Akmeel et al., 2025). A city that can accommodate postpartum bodies is, by necessity, better equipped to support other forms of vulnerability too: aging, disability, illness, injury, and precarity.

What It Revealed About Culture 

The sculptor worked directly with more than forty postpartum women. She listened to their experiences and collaborated through live casting and digital scanning to build a composite figure. Mother Vérité is not a portrait of a single individual. She is the everymother. Again and again, people spoke about how rare it was to see postpartum bodies represented at all. 

The statue’s unidealised details - postpartum engorged breasts, swollen abdomen, stretch marks, heaviness, fatigue - expose and reject the smoothing logics of advertising, algorithmic vision, and celebratory monumental convention. Yet the medium of bronze unmistakably belongs to traditions of permanence, durability, and civic honour.

Mother Vérité does not offer a solution. It offers a proposition: that fragility can be monumental, and that care should not be a private matter, but one of our society’s organising principles.

Read the full White Paper, “Mother Vérité: Postpartum Monumentality in the Visual Public Realm,” by Marine Tanguy and Holly Norman here. 

Image credits: Mother+

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