Thomas J. Price’s ‘sculptures about statues’ stir conversations about race and hierarchy | Canada Voices

There’s a young woman standing at the southwest corner of McCaul and Dundas Streets in Toronto with her hands stuck in her pockets and a faraway expression on her face. Her posture and her dress are casual; she’s Black and wears her hair in a top knot. All in all, she’s a pretty ordinary-looking person – except that she’s almost three metres tall and made of bronze.

The British sculptor Thomas J. Price strikes again. He is known for his monumental portraits of average Black people, installed in public places as a commentary on commemoration, social hierarchies and race, “sculptures about statues,” as he puts it. One similar sculpture placed in Times Square in New York last spring drew some criticism from online commentators who seemed to miss that point, complaining the heavy-set figure in everyday clothes was an unflattering portrait of African-American women.

The Toronto woman, a work from 2022 entitled Moments Contained that exists in an edition of three, was recently acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, purchased by a group of donors largely drawn from Toronto’s Black and Caribbean communities. Mounted not on a plinth nor on horseback, she is solidly anchored into the pavement and will be standing permanently outside the AGO.

On the eve of her unveiling, The Globe spoke with Price about his techniques and intentions.

You describe your figures as fictional, but their faces and bodies are very well observed. Where do they come from?

They are composites, amalgams. It’s important that they are fictional as a critique of portraiture, the idea that an individual can be seen as so valuable that they can be held above others, the whole idea of monuments.

I’m trying to invoke in the viewer a sense of empathy, opening a space between the viewer and this character. I start with a feeling. If you go around the figures, their expressions change: There’s this ambiguity in the expression.

They’re based around people that feel believable to me, people I’ve seen. I’ve always been fascinated by faces and people, and wondering what is going on inside that head, what’s their world. I guess that’s connected to my experience of people misreading me and not understanding who I feel I am. When somebody responds to you in a way that isn’t in keeping with who you feel you might be as a person, for me it triggered a fascination in one sense, but also a slight worry that other people read me in a negative way, particularly when it came to race.

Walk me through your technical process. I understand you start with three-dimensional digital scans of real people, but how do you get from there to a fictional bronze?

I take these scans and I create these sort of Frankensteins, where I take somebody’s ears and then a nose from somebody and the eyebrow ridge from somebody, the way that somebody stands, maybe someone’s hands. I create these slightly disjointed elements which are then resculpted to create this whole, this believable human being.

The work used to be made around a little maquette with oil-based clay and then I would make a slightly larger one which would scale up, all by hand in clay. Now I use 3-D software where I can sculpt this kind of malleable digital clay. There’s this sort of this mental haptic feedback the way that the clay layers up or gets scooped away. I get almost the same satisfaction, this tactile sense.

It is still built around trying to reach this emotional point. It’s almost like sculpting with your eyes half closed and then this thing emerges and you sort of wander towards it.

Henry Moore changed the AGO. What’s next?

Once that digital model is finished it goes to a burn-out process. Instead of having this object which I’ve sculpted by hand, I use 3-D printing to create a shell. The final pouring of the bronze, it’s the same as the lost-wax process: You create the negative space by burning out the 3-D positive which creates the cavity into which the bronze is then poured. And the parts are then welded together.

Bronze is such an incredible alloy, it’s amazingly sound; in terms of erosion resistance, it’s fantastic. I work with the connotations bronze carries in terms of power. The figures are imbued with thought and time and this worthiness, this preciousness in material and labour.

When Grounded in the Stars was installed in Times Square, there was some criticism, both accusations that the work was a DEI initiative and also remarks that if you were celebrating somebody, the figure should have been slimmer or more glamorous. How did you react?

This work was shown before in L.A., with none of that controversy. I think what really happened was that the online world did its thing. The negative opinions were either from bots or from people who hadn’t seen the work itself and were responding to right-wing insults.

When Fox News came through and did their piece calling it DEI, the MAGA types were performatively outraged. I think perhaps that triggered some people who have been on the receiving end of insults from people like that; and they were feeling the pain of insults about the work and the easiest thing to go for is the object of the derision.

It wasn’t a reflection of the real-world experience. People were just observing the sculpture, people were queuing up to have their picture taken, hugging the sculpture, sometimes puzzled, who is she? And people saying “Oh, she’s me.” People who literally look like her.

The work is a mirror: it reveals people’s attitudes.

Your sculptural approach has been so successful. Do you ever think of applying it to any other group of people?

I’m cautious not to be seen as being presumptuous. And now I give you … name a group, right? I don’t think that’s my responsibility and I don’t necessarily think that’s my place. Why can’t people who look like me represent humanity? Why can we not find empathy in people who don’t look like us? I’ve used things that are familiar to me and integral to me as a way of trying to communicate that. I think that has integrity to it and authenticity to it, and I don’t want to be seen as jumping on a bandwagon.

It took me a long time to feel comfortable making a woman. Ultimately the key was just to make it the same way as I’ve done the male characters and to allow the humanity to come through.

This interview has been edited and condensed.