art
marian re-made interview: Lauryn Wilson image: Backlit Gallery
Ahead of the unveiling of Maid Marian Way’s new statue, artist Alicja Biała talks to LeftLion about her creative process, community involvement and why representation of women in public spaces matters. The council selected you to make the Maid Marian statue that’ll be unveiled in July for Maid Marian Way – could you tell me how you were picked? It was a closed competition. The council partnered with Backlit and invited six artists, including me, to compete for this opportunity. If we accepted, we sent in our tailored portfolios. Then we received a brief that began with quite a detailed explanation of what the public wants. I submitted three different proposals, they narrowed the artists down to three, and then we had to develop a more concrete proposal, including a budget, technical drawings and samples, to present to the council in person. It was a long process; it took a little over a year. What was your process for making the statue? The main aspect I noticed about the brief was that it was incredibly broad; people didn’t necessarily have a single vision of what Maid Marian represents, so I thought of doing something community-based and open-ended so it could have multiple interpretations. It wouldn’t be a realistic statue with a very rigid intention; it would be something that could be filled in with all the desires and attachments mentioned in the brief. With Backlit, we invited over a hundred local people to workshops who brought different foliage from different plants from Nottingham and around. Some people would bring plants from their gardens, so each one had a personal story. Then, based on those plants, we created wax moulds for a long process called the lost wax technique, in which you pour molten metal into the mould, so each part is cast in
bronze and then welded together into one 2.3m tall statue of Maid Marian. Could you tell me more about your workshops with Backlit? I put public engagement in my proposal, so we decided to run workshops in the Backlit gallery and created different slots where everyone was welcome. I presented the project to every single group and held three different activities: one with drawing, painting and making cutouts of Maid Marian, another for airdrying clay, and another for creating waxes. After the workshops, I was left with a large collection, and I took many of the pieces to turn into metal for the sculpture components. The remaining ones are still at Backlit, and on 17 July, we will open an exhibition with all the parts from the workshop. I also recorded a video documentation of every single piece that the people of Nottingham had done during the workshop. It was such a wonderful space, and it’s really fantastic to see so many people sign up to participate.
I wanted young girls to look at it and think, “This represents me in so many ways” Was there any particular version of Maid Marian and her folklore that inspired your piece? I wanted to create a new version! One that was a living statue, not Cate Blanchett or a fox from a Disney movie. I was trying to escape these representations and propose a very different narrative that’s embedded in the spirit, folksiness and storytelling. The city wanted me to point towards the May Day tradition that is linked with Maid Marian, so I designed an elaborate headpiece for her. She is very much a May Queen. Statistics show that only 2.7% of statues in the UK are of non-royal women. Is it important to you to represent women in statues?
It is. I did another one two years ago, and we’re unveiling it soon – it was touching on the same thing: we just do not have a representation of women. It’s a global problem; everywhere you go, you don’t see women represented in public spaces or most of the time they’re just going to be nymphs or beauty figures, not people who are appreciated for their achievements or abilities. I think this is why I didn’t try to make it abstract, because we need a physical representation. Maybe not one-to-one because you can’t make a portrait of a person when you don’t know what they looked like, but I still really wanted to make it clear that the statue is of a woman. I wanted young girls to look at it and think, “This represents me in so many ways.” I completely think it’s so important. The unveiling of Alicja Biala’s Maid Marian will take place on Friday 17 July. For more information head to Backlit’s website. backlit.org.uk
Exhibition review: folklore and fitness Two very different exhibitions are currently displayed at the Nottingham Contemporary. In one, classical sculptures intersect with modern fitness culture. In the other, a Brazilian artist creates an imagined folklore…
Physical Culture, the Nottingham Contemporary’s newest offering, seems like an exercise in demystification. The exhibition is a fully functional gym, with weights replaced by the heads of classical sculptures and other art pieces – eyes, artists models, legs. When I visited on opening night, the functionality and oppressive atmosphere of the exhibition, between stark lighting, thumping music, and a demarcated running track linking its two gallery spaces, rendered the space pointedly gym-like. Our attention is split between faces and bodies. We’re invited to subdivide bodies into parts – eyes, limbs, flexion and extension – following the rote workouts of the trainers and hyperfocused illustrations of the artists who each
30 leftlion.co.uk
populate the exhibit. Artist Augustas Serapinas created Physical Culture first as a student at the Vilnius Academy of Art in 2012, and it has been exhibited internationally since then. Serapinas’ experience with formal art study was what kindled the link between the repetitive, practiced attention to the body in figure drawing and bodybuilding. Serapinas imagined the exhibition as a critique of educational practices – “The first gym I created [...] was full of student works - casts, assignments, pieces left behind”. Participants engage repetitively with the weights of history and culture, becoming acolytes of the cult of the body. But, since 2012, the issue at hand has bulked up. The intersection of bodybuilding and philhellenism has taken on a life of its own as a political symbol in the hyper-online conservative movement through incendiary figures like Bronze Age Pervert and Mike Ma whose ideas have filtered into the mainstream. But while that shadow hangs over the exhibition Physical Culture struggles to extricate itself from mythic parallels of art, sculpture and fitness on which it was first drawn up. Elsewhere in the Contemporary lies And the soul is for the birds: a solo exhibition of the work of Brazilian painter Chico da Silva. The exhibition is arranged like a fairytale bestiary, a dimly lit assortment of untitled pieces depicting strange creatures with sharp teeth and skin in textile patterns. Many of these paintings are fringed with foliage – like a series of vignettes interspersed through an expansive, amphibious forest. In these hallucinatory environments, creatures are either actively grappling, or simply considering each other, teeth bared, with jaws and tongues exploring the neutral space between the two beasts. Occasionally, da Silva’s usual side-on
words: Hal Hewlett photos: Ding Musa | Jules Lister
perspective falters, and a creature will sport two eyes rather than one. Early on in the gallery, I found myself particularly struck by Jellyfish and Piranhas. The piece depicts a shoal of piranhas, sawtoothed mouths dumbfoundedly half-open, swimming in the wake of a massive jellyfish, as it unthinkingly moves through the rough pattern of the top of the frame. The jellyfish looks strange and eldritch, a network of varicose strings coursing through its bell that emerge from a pair of crazed eyes. Towards the edge of the bell, blues and reds create a series of arches reminiscent of a big top circus tent to which the piranhas are attempting to gain access and, in the midst of the grappling, biting creatures that decorate the walls, it is difficult not to find this extremely serene. Chico da Silva’s And the soul is for the birds and Augustas Serapinas’ Physical Culture are exhibiting at Nottingham Contemporary until Sunday 6 September 2026. nottinghamcontemporary.org