Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, installation view, Southbank Centre, London
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, installation view, Southbank Centre, London
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024
hanging mobile, ‘You Belong Here’, Southbank Centre, London
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst was commissioned as part of ‘You Belong Here’, a series of public art projects placed around the Southbank Centre. It comprises a hanging mobile – a temporary monument celebrating the work of artist, suffragette and anti-fascist Sylvia Pankhurst. Despite her leading role in winning votes for women in the UK she not been memorialised in a public statue in Britain, unlike her more conservative mother and sister. Pankhurst’s later campaigns against fascism and imperialism are relatively unknown in her home country, much of which focussed on the cause of Ethiopian independence, and the influence of her socialist feminist ideas on the formation of a welfare state.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882. In 1903 she was part of founding the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – better known as the militant suffragettes.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. Sylvia Pankhurst trains as an artist at the Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1906.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. As a suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested and sent to prison many times while campaigning for votes for women.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. In 1914 she founds the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS), who take over a pub in Bow called The Gunner’s Arms, renaming it The Mother’s Arms.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. In 1920 Sylvia Pankhurst attends the Second Congress of the Third International in Moscow, where she debates with Lenin.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. Sylvia Pankhurst protesting in Trafalgar Square in 1932 against British policies in India.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. She is a friend and correspondent of many prominent figures within the Pan-African movement, including Amy Ashwood Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois and Jomo Kenyatta.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. W.E.B. Du Bois.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. Jomo Kenyatta.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. In 1935 Mussolini’s Italian fascist forces invade Ethiopia. Sylvia Pankhurst founds the newspaper New Times and Ethiopia News to campaign for Ethiopian independence.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. Sylvia Pankhurst is one of few Europeans to understand Ethiopia’s symbolic importance as the only African country to have remained uncolonized by European powers, until the Italian occupation.
Memorial for Sylvia Pankhurst, 2024, pencil on paper sketch. In 1956 Pankhurst moves to Ethiopia at the invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie. She dies in Addis Ababa in 1960.
Further Reading
‘You Belong Here’, Southbank Centre, 2024
(view here)