October 17th: Today's Feature - Thomas J. Price
- webbworks333
- Oct 16
- 2 min read
October
Thomas J. Price was born in 1981 to a British mother and Jamaican father. He studied at the Royal College of Art and lives and works in Deptford, south London.
'Network' is a contemporary statue, created by Price in 2014, and its current home is at the White Collar Factory, east London.
1 Old Street Yard, EC1Y 8AF
In 2020 Price released the female version of the same statue called Reaching Out, which can be found at Three Mills Green. Both bronze figures depict the users on their mobiles.
The artist creates his works using the lost-wax process, also called cire-perdue, a method of metal casting first used thousands of years ago in Africa, as with the Benin Bronzes in the 13th century. The artist pours metal into a mould that has been made using a wax model.
His work is engaged with issues of representation and perception in society and art. It also raises questions and invites conversations regarding who we put on pedestals, and why.
His figures represent everyday Black people who are unheroic and are getting on with daily life.
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Reaching Out (2020), Price's first individual full figure representation of a woman, has been shown as part of the art project The Line in the East End of London. Price has also been selected to create an artwork to be unveiled in 2022 commemorating the Windrush generation for Hackney Town Hall.
Price studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. There have been major exhibitions of his work at the National Portrait Gallery, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Reaching Out, on Three Mills Island
The statue is 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and weighing 420 kilograms. The work is deliberately not based on any particular woman. She is depicted on her mobile phone. Thomas Price says “I want this sculpture to be an opportunity for people to connect emotionally with an image of someone they might not have noticed before,” Price said.
It was installed on Three Mills Green near Stratford, east London, and was part of The Line, the city's only dedicated public art walk, which follows the Greenwich meridian, until August 26th 2022.
This is only the third statue in the United Kingdom of a black woman, and the first by a black sculptor. The other two are the statue of Mary Seacole outside St Thomas' Hospital, and a representation of black motherhood in Stockwell.
Reaching Out would have been the fourth if the artist Marc Quinn had succeeded in persuading authorities in Bristol to keep his pop-up sculpture of Jen Reid, the Black Lives Matter protester, longer than 25 hours. Prior to the installation of Quinn's piece, Price had been invited by TIME to contribute an article discussing the legacy of colonial monuments and the removal of the statue of Edward Colston.
Within the article, Price noted "White artists are putting themselves forward to create replacement sculptures of slave owners with no sense of irony. That's a saviour complex, and that exemplifies what is wrong, when even the solution doesn't involve the Black experience."