Chiswick sculptor celebrates pioneering landscape designer with public statue

Image: Gilian Brett with the wax model of her sculpture of Fanny Wilkinson

“I feel so proud of this woman who achieved so much against all the odds”

Chiswick sculptor Gillian Brett is working on a commission for her first public sculpture – a statue of the pioneering garden designer Fanny Wilkinson for a park in Wandsworth.

Fanny was the first female professional landscape designer, a Victorian visionary who wanted to create green spaces all across London so the city’s poor could have somewhere to go outdoors and appreciate natural beauty. She was responsible for the design and the layout of more than 75 public parks across London.

“I feel so proud of this woman who achieved so much against all the odds,” Gillian told The Chiswick Calendar. “She was the first woman to train at a horticultural college in Crystal Palace, and she created all these parks at a time when women just didn’t do this sort of thing, despite people saying: ‘you can’t do this,’ and ‘you can’t do that,’ she just did it!”

Images: (L) The sculpture of Fanny as a 12 inch ceramic maquette; (R) as a half-life-size wax model at the Pangolin Editions Foundry in Gloucestershire

A competition to replace a stolen statue

The commission has come about as the result of a competition. The Friends of Coronation Gardens in Wandsworth went to Putney Art School because they wanted an artist to design a statue to replace one that had been stolen from a granite plinth in the park, near Wimbledon.

The art college organised a competition, which Gillian duly entered along with a number of others. She discovered Fanny had designed the park, and the more she researched her, the more convinced she was that Fanny should be celebrated.

“To me there was no other solution other than Fanny Wilkinson because I thought she was just so impressive. I was amazed that other people didn’t suggest her. She was a suffragist and had friends who were suffragettes. She changed the face of London.”

Since she heard she had won the competition last spring, Gillian has been making a half-life sized sculpture of Fanny in bronze, using the “lost wax process”, which she describes as “a very ancient process” for casting bronze.

She first made a maquette in clay and fired it to ceramic. She then fell off her bike and broke her elbow, which slowed things down some, but the foundry she is working with in Gloucestershire, Pangolin Editions, were able to scan the maquette and blow it up using a digital printing process and create a larger wax version which she was then able to work on to add detail.

Images: Gillian at the Pangolin Editions foundry watching the molten bronze being poured into the mould

They then made a ceramic outer of a mix of ceramic and silicone and burned away the wax by pouring in molten bronze.

“They looked like astronauts, in all the gear. It was amazing to watch. They really know what they are doing, the quality of the work is fantastic,” said Gillian.

Fanny is being made in three pieces – hands, head and body. She now needs to be assembled and coloured. She will stand on the plinth above a basin which has weathered with age, and Gillian wants to match the patination.

Image: Making Fanny at the Foundry

As this is in a public park, there have been many committee meetings to get it this far. Funding for the project has come from Heritage of London, Wandsworth Council and the Friends of Coronation Gardens.

Apart from the aesthetic and historical considerations, materials and costs and health and safety have all been discussed, but all being well Fanny will be bolted to her plinth in time for a public unveiling on Thursday 3 July.

READ ALSO: Sculpture at the Brewery

You can see some of Gillian’s work meanwhile in The Chiswick Calendar’s Sculpture at the Brewery exhibition at the Fuller’s Griffin Brewery, which opened at the weekend. Gillian is showing her portrait sculptures along with three other 3D artists – Madeleine Marsh, Roz Wallis and Caroline Winn, and painter Annabel Hill.

Image: Gilian Brett with the wax model

Photographs by Steve Russell Studios Ltd

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