Blogging Woolf

This banner promoting fundraising for the Virginia Woolf statue was displayed at the banquet at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Reading.

Virginia Woolf will be seated on a bench at Richmond upon Thames, Riverside, for all to see — and sit next to — if a heritage project seeking £50,000 through crowd-funding is successful.

Arts and education charity Aurora Metro launched the project to create the first ever life-sized, full-figure bronze depiction of Woolf. The London Borough of Richmond has recently given the public the opportunity to comment on the proposal via a consultation document on its website. Deadline for commenting is Dec. 10.

Society says sculptor fails to capture Woolf

The executive council of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has discussed the proposal and told the Borough of Richmond that, although it fully endorses the idea of a full-figure statue of Woolf in the Borough to memorialize the importance of her time there, unfortunately it feels that sculptor Laury Dizengremel has not captured Woolf’s likeness, according to an email the group sent members.  The IVWS membership agrees.

See for yourself

You can see for yourself by visiting the Aurora Metro website, where you can view three photos depicting the statue. You can make a donation at that page as well. The statue project also has a Facebook page.

If you would like to volunteer to help raise funds for the Virginia Woolf statue, contact info@aurorametro.com

Movement for more women

The Woolf statue is part of a movement to see more women memorialized as statues around Great Britain.

In March 2016 in the New Statesman, Caroline Criado-Perez surveyed the nation’s statues by gender and discovered “a mere 2.7 per cent are of historical, non-royal women. If you’re a woman, your best chance at becoming a statue is to be a mythical or allegorical figure, a famous virgin, royal or nude.”

She has also launched a campaign to get a statue of a suffragette erected in Parliament Square and has a petition asking the Mayor of London to do so.