Seated, Serendipity And What Public Sculpture Can Do

Tschabalala Self’s Seated has stood on the lawn of the De La Warr Pavilion since 2023. It is a bronze figure three metres high, a woman in a yellow dress and sunhat, seated in her chair and looking out to the Channel. It was Self’s first public sculpture, originally presented at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London. Here, anyone walking along the seafront comes across it without planning to. There is no ticket, no gallery, no wall text.

This is the main thing public sculpture does that a gallery cannot. Inside, people choose to look at art: they decide to visit and arrive ready for it. Outside, a work has to reach people who were not looking for it: someone walking a dog, a family heading to the beach, a passenger waiting for a bus. Most of them did not set out to see a sculpture. Public art depends on that kind of chance encounter, and often means more to people because it was unexpected.

Seated makes a good case for this. Self takes an ordinary act, sitting down, taking up space, looking at the view, and gives it the scale and permanence of a monument. The figure is not performing for anyone. She is simply there, at ease, and that ease invites everyone else to feel they have a right to the same space. When the sculpture was defaced in 2023, more than three hundred people came to the lawn to help clean and restore it. A work nobody had bought a ticket for had plainly become the town’s own.

This autumn gives the point a much bigger stage. On 10 September, Self’s Lady in Blue will be unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, the sixteenth commission there since the programme began. Where the Bexhill figure sits and looks out to sea, this one is walking forward: an everywoman, as Self describes her, cast in bronze and patinated with lapis lazuli, a blue long associated with the sacred. Self has said the figure is not an idol or a historical figurehead but an ordinary woman moving forward with purpose. It will stay in the square for around two years.

The two works belong together. Both step away from the traditional monument. In place of the general, the statesman, or the man on a pedestal, they put an ordinary woman in public space. Both rely on being come across rather than sought out. That is the quiet argument public sculpture makes: art belongs in the places people already move through, and being surprised by it is part of the point. If you have not yet spent a moment with Seated on the lawn, this is a good autumn to do it, and to look out for her counterpart in London.