COUNTY NEWS: Naked statue of Margaret Thatcher to go on show in Sussex

A naked statue of Margaret Thatcher is to go on display in a Sussex gallery next month.
Maggie Island, Marcus Harvey, 2015 © Marcus Harvey, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, Courtesy Private Collection SUS-160622-111257001Maggie Island, Marcus Harvey, 2015 © Marcus Harvey, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, Courtesy Private Collection SUS-160622-111257001
Maggie Island, Marcus Harvey, 2015 © Marcus Harvey, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, Courtesy Private Collection SUS-160622-111257001

‘Maggie Island’ is a piece by leading British artist Marcus Harvey and depicts the former Prime Minister lying on her side with a pig’s head on her hip.

The piece will be on show at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings from July 16 as part of Mr Harvey’s Inselaffe exhibition.

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The exhibition is described as ‘a series of tough, but humorous, ceramic sculptures and paintings that forge motifs and emblems relating to notions of Britishness and embroiled history such as militaria and joke shop knick-knacks forged into collaged portraits of historical figures; from Nelson to Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon to Tony Blair’.

Mr Harvey said: “It is partly to wrest something from the all-pervading guilt over colonial misdemeanours and in part to ironize an overly romantic valuation of the past. The sentiment seems to be in equal measure irony and affection.”

On the Margaret Thatcher statue, the artist added: “While musing on the personification of a nation, through the image of a female reclining nude – Margaret Thatcher/Britannia - nothing living could be summoned unless it was the sum of its anxieties, again both political and cultural. Collaged from wood and meat, literally pig’s heads and plates, the figure is alive and luxuriating in its admission of jingoism and greed.”

Visit www.jerwoodgallery.org/whatson/42/inselaffe for more information.

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