Mother Vérité: Postpartum Monumentality in the Visual Public Realm
Authors: Marine Tanguy and Holly Norman
Editorial team: Professor Henrietta L. Moore (Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity)
This white paper from the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) explores how arts-led inquiry can bring into view stories and questions that are often marginalised or kept private. Focusing on Mother Vérité – a public sculpture by Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark – the paper examines how interventions in the visual public realm can reshape understandings of care, recovery, interdependence, and embodied labour.
For IGP, the significance of Mother Vérité lies in what it makes possible to imagine. Prosperity is not only about economic growth or material wealth, but about the conditions that enable people to live, care, recover, and participate with dignity.
By placing postpartum experience at the centre of public space, the sculpture raises fundamental questions: which bodies are permitted to appear in the city, under what conditions, and with what consequences? In doing so, it reveals the often-invisible infrastructures – material, social, and moral – that shape everyday experiences of prosperity.
Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the work creates the conditions for encounter, reflection, and dialogue.
“By placing postpartum recovery at the centre of the visual public realm, Mother Vérité invites a fundamental reconsideration of what public space is for, and whom it is designed to support. It raises not only symbolic questions about representation, but material questions about how cities accommodate – or exclude – the conditions of care on which life depends. In this sense, the sculpture offers a compelling lens through which to understand prosperity as something grounded in lived experience rather than abstract measure.”
- Professor Dame Henrietta L. Moore
This paper reads Mother Vérité as a disruptive intervention in everyday urban life. It challenges dominant assumptions about gender, motherhood, and monumentality by making postpartum embodiment both visible and ordinary – vulnerable yet resilient, intimate yet public.
Through this intervention, maternal labour is repositioned not as a private responsibility, but as a public and political concern.
During the installation, MTArt Agency collected over 150 responses from people encountering the sculpture in situ – commuters, parents, visitors, and passers-by. These responses capture moments of recognition, discomfort, reflection, and dialogue, as well as subtle shifts in how the space itself was experienced and understood.
This research demonstrates how public art can act as a site of civic imagination. It shows that prosperity is shaped not only by what cities produce, but by how they enable people to rest, recover, connect, and care.
At a time of increasing social and environmental strain, this work highlights the importance of collective capacities – to imagine, to feel, and to build futures together. Public art, in this sense, becomes a catalyst for social and political renewal, challenging dominant narratives while elevating marginalised voices.
A city that can accommodate postpartum bodies is, by necessity, better equipped to support other forms of vulnerability – including ageing, disability, illness, and precarity. Maternal belonging, in this sense, becomes a powerful diagnostic of civic inclusivity.
This paper was led by Marine Tanguy, Founder and CEO of MTArt Agency, in collaboration with the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), whose research and practice are dedicated to rethinking and redesigning prosperity for the 21st century.