British sculptor Thomas J. Price on his quietly radical statues

The day before Thomas J. Price and I speak, I’m on a video call with Megan Robson, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney. She’s talking me through the gallery’s commission of a public sculpture by Price that was unveiled this week. I’m commuting between meetings as I listen to Robson explain its technical aspects. She shares her screen with me and I’m looking at renders of Price’s work, a large-scale Black woman’s head with box braids, her baby hairs laid just right, cast in golden bronze. I immediately start crying in the middle of the street.

I’m familiar with Price’s sculptures, which feature fictionalised Black characters, but I wasn’t expecting to become emotional. It’s rare to see images of people of African descent in Australia in the mainstream that give us agency and that see us – fully.

I tell Price about my initial reaction to Ancient Feelings when we speak via video call. “There is something about large scale that immediately communicates value,” he says. “That immediately communicates this idea of presence and power in a way that is empowering. When you see images of yourself in a format which is empowering, it communicates that to you, it gives you a vision of what you can manifest in yourself or what someone like you can be like.” he says.

It’s morning in London, toward the tail end of summer, and Price has just returned from work trips to China, where he was visiting a foundry, and Canada, where one of his works went on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He says he’s meant to be on holiday. “I’m not very good at vacation,” he says, grinning. “I was in the studio the other day, unbeknownst to my studio manager.”

He’s a born and bred Londoner and I ask if the city grounds him. “I have my family here and so there’s that familiarity about a place, I guess, and how it fuses you with this sense of familiarity and perhaps that gives a bit more calm.”

Price credits his mother for his interest in art. She was artistic and encouraged his creativity as a child. He remembers visiting galleries and museums and noticing the lack of people who looked like him in the works on display. “Pretty much any institution I went to in London or when I was growing up, which are these cathedrals to cultural significance, power and belonging, and I never saw myself in them, as a Black man.”

Price, who grew up in public housing with his mother and two brothers, initially wanted to be a physiotherapist. He also contemplated joining the Royal Marines, drawn to what he thought the army offered an 18-year-old: clarity and refuge. Thankfully, his mother quickly talked him out of that. “She said to me: do you want to really go off and take orders from the people that you’re at school with? And I was like, ‘Hell no,’ ” Price says.

He decided to give art a try and fell in love, eventually ending up at Chelsea College of Arts, where he made his only performance work to date, Licked (2001). Over the course of three days Price licked an entire gallery wall, which made his tongue bleed. The result was a strikingly blood-stained wall.

The work emerged when the Young British Artists (YBAs) were creating work that was challenging notions of who could make art. “I didn’t like the shock stuff. None of that stuff was shocking,” he says of the YBAs. Why? “Because I felt it was like a performative teenager kind of stuff where people were trying to get the attention of [Charles] Saatchi.”

Despite the success of Licked, Price changed course. “The expectation after that piece was I do another one or do something else,” he says. “But what do you do? You have to up the ante. And what I realised was that I was really interested in space and in the way that we understand space and movement within space.”

He went on to receive his MFA from the Royal College of Art. Today Price’s practice is multidisciplinary, spanning performance, video, paintings, photography and animation. He has described his work as an “exercise in restraint”. He is well known for large-scale figurative bronze sculptures that capture everyday Blackness. These fictional characters are portrayed in poses not traditionally associated with sculpture. Price tells me that “the figures are not individual people; they’re amalgamations of different sources”.

I first encountered these monumental works at the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2023 Triennial, which featured two in the atrium: All in (2021) and Reaching out (2020). The figures depict characters of African descent and are striking, not only because of their scale but because of their ordinariness. A woman with her hair up in a bun is looking down at her phone, while a man dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie stands with both hands in his pockets and looks confidently into the distance.

Black bodies have historically been subjected to surveillance, hyper-sexualisation and policing, and this continues now. Very rarely are we permitted to just be. These works refuse to perform a version of Black excellence: instead they insist that being seen as simply human can be profoundly affirming.

Price says he didn’t know the power of his work until he saw Black people reacting to it in public. “I hadn’t realised what I wasn’t experiencing until I made it, which is so weird,” he says. He recalls one moment in London in 2017. He was installing aluminium heads in public and two Black families noticed the sculptures, the children running to take a closer look. “I don’t know if they’re like a brother and sister or just friends, but they’re holding hands and they’re touching the face of these heads and the girl said to the boy: ‘There we are.’ And I remember being like, ‘Well, alright. It’s not just me.’ ”

While he is aware that the work carries particular significance for people of African descent, he’s quick to underscore that he doesn’t have an audience in mind: “I make the work because I feel I need to understand the world better around me and I need to try to communicate my questions to the world.”

Placing these ordinary Black characters in spaces that have historically been exclusionary is a radical act. Beyond representation, the works challenge assumptions about power and who gets to be memorialised. This creates discomfort – Price’s works generate conversations and some describe them with the weasel word “controversial”. The controversy: why are these large-scale ordinary Black characters cast in bronze allowed to take up public space?

Earlier this year, a four-metre statue of a Black woman was unveiled in Times Square in New York. While many embraced its presence in one of the world’s iconic locations, it made some people angry. That commentary is not worth repeating, but Price is attuned to the varied responses his work elicits. “I think New York showed this massively,” he says. “It’s that when there’s such little representation, any new thing which creates an expansion of representation becomes incredibly visible, incredibly fraught with the expectations of so many different people – wildly disparate expectations.”

For Price, the assumptions viewers place on the work are equally revealing. “To place the work in Times Square, well, the presumption is that it’s supposed to represent the average Black American woman,” he says. “The labelling and the expectations placed on a work, which is actually about a deep, broad, psychological possibility, is turned into something very specific and it’s assumed to be the thing that monuments do: which is talk about something specific. And so people go, either, ‘That’s fantastic. That’s me. That’s amazing.’ Or they go, ‘That’s not me. How dare you?’ Because the work has the burden of the dearth of exclusion.”

It’s confounding to think that these fictionalised characters draw so much commentary, but for Price that remains the point of the work. His work is being made in difficult times, with the rise of populism and far-right nationalism in the West and the swift rollback of measures designed to create equity for historically marginalised people. For Price, this adds a layer of urgency to his work.

“They’re trying to normalise bigotry,” he says. “They’re trying to normalise this scapegoating and normalise all the negative things that we’ve been trying to move away from. And I feel like there is a very legitimate argument for me trying to counter that. Being almost aggressively present and mindful about protecting your positivity and putting that out into the world. And I think that what I’m trying to do is not fall for the snake oil salesmen.”

MCA’s museum director Suzanne Cotter says the Sydney sculpture hasn’t prompted any anxiety. “What is controversial about the figure of a woman who happens to be Black?” she asks. “Although you see many, many white people walking around Circular Quay, we also see many people of colour, of different cultural and racial origins. It’s just not controversial at all.”

Price’s sculpture is the first in the museum’s new yearly series, the Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission, which invites Australian and international contemporary artists to create ambitious sculptural works. Cotter, who was introduced to Price’s work at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne, says it is serendipitous that he is the inaugural artist. “When Thomas was on his way to Melbourne for the opening of the Triennial, he had 24 hours in Sydney,” she says. “He stood with his gallerist in front of the MCA and said, ‘This would be an amazing place to have one of my sculptures.’ … We only found out subsequent to extending the invitation.”

The Tallawoladah Lawn – commonly known as The Rocks – was once home to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, for whom colonisation brought dispossession, displacement and decimation. Placing Ancient Feelings in this context, as Canadian curator and academic Julie Crooks has noted, is significant. “Given the underlying ethos of Price’s work, which is to challenge deeply entrenched notions of race, power and representation, the centrality of these statues within the context of Australia’s deeply fraught and violent white-settler colonial histories is itself a significant, bold, monumental curatorial choice.”

For Price, the responsibility lies with the viewer and how they choose to respond. “I’m not an artist who’s trying to didactically crush people into having an opinion or into a way of thinking,” he says. “I’m saying: notice this space when you are with yourself and you are not beholden to expectations. There’s a depth to be explored in terms of why we even feel a certain way about that work and I would never back away from that. But is it about a specific thing? No. It’s not about that particular movement or a particular stance. It is a conductor for the circumstances and the context that surrounds it.”

Price takes his time responding to questions. I sense he is aware that not only his work but also he as an artist might be misread. He carries the burden of being one of the few Black sculptors making work for audiences around the world at a grand scale and the pressures that come with that visibility. He says he tries not to think about it too much, as it’s “the price of admission”.

“I now occupy a position of privilege, which puts me in the firing line concerning different people’s opinions, expectations,” he says. “That’s just how it is. How do I feel about that as a human being? It’s tough. Because, you know, I’m an emotional human being, I got into art because I was a sensitive person and I wanted to feel out the world.”

I keep thinking about Price’s decision to centre a Black woman in Sydney Harbour, and I text him a few days later to ask why. “I just chose the character I thought would create a lot of potential points of connection with viewers,” he answers. “Black women are the origins of all humanity, so perhaps it felt like the right piece (especially considering the title, Ancient Feelings) to place in a country that could be considered relatively young, whilst in fact the land and the real history of the people and place are ancient.”