Trafalgar Square, London
The Malawian-born artist’s traditional bronze figures might suggest a win for the culture warriors, but they subversively celebrate an anti-colonial hero
Two greyish-brown bronze figures stand on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. Although both are much more than lifesize, one is unnaturally taller than the other; this is the only thing that deviates from the pair’s studied naturalism. So seamlessly do they blend with the other bronze statues, with Nelson on his column and Landseer’s lions, one might begin to think that this particular battleground in the culture wars had been won by the hang ’em, flog ’em, statue-loving heritage side. Instead of the melted ice-cream of Heather Phillipson’s The End, which recently vacated the plinth, we’ve now got patinated bronze and figures that could easily have been sculpted more than a century ago. Even their clothing belongs to the past.
In every other respect, Malawi-born artist Samson Kambalu’s embrace of the past, his play with conservative formal values, materials and the decorum of public statuary (which threaten to be as dull as the bronze itself) is a disguise. A sculptor of monuments, Kambalu is not. The two figures are based on 3D scans of live models, and made from resin, stainless steel and bronze-powder. The figures, as well as their clothing and poses, are based on a 1914 photograph of pan-Africanist Baptist preacher John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley, taken in what was then called Nyasaland, and is now Malawi.
