Meet Sheila, the five-metre-tall $500,000 artwork that has Brisbane split.
Even the artist behind the statue of the squat woman with four breasts describes its commissioning as a “ballsy decision”.
There’s one thing admirers and critics can agree on though: Sheila is, for better or worse, destined to become a Brisbane landmark.
“You could think: ‘Mmm, are people going to like this?’” artist Justene Williams says. “She has breasts, it is a female form … it’s not anything that is weird, it’s just we are not used to seeing those kinds of forms in public art.
“So hats off to them for actually going ahead with it.”
Sheila opened to the public on Thursday and is part of $13m worth of public art in the $3.6bn Queens Wharf casino-led development on the CBD’s north shore.
“It’s definitely a statue,” 20-year-old engineering student Pat says, snapping a picture of Sheila as he checks out the new 12-hectare precinct. “Strange is probably the word to describe it.”
“Interesting, yes,” YouTuber Adam Young adds. “But I just think it looks ugly.”
Perhaps, but if Williams had her way, Sheila would have been even more confronting – to the prudish viewer, at least.
The head of sculpture at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art and Design was partly inspired by a mysterious, grotesque figure from the European middle ages: sheela na gig.
While sheelas traditionally expose an exaggerated vulva, Williams says her version had to be toned down for the modern general public.
“But I like that she is quite the exhibitionist,” the artist says.
It was the many meanings associated with sheela na gig that Williams wanted to explore with her work.
“I was interested in looking at exactly what was she?” Williams says of the historic sheela. “Because it is still kind of contested as to what she is; is she like a fertility symbol, the hag, the protector, a gargoyle – or is she just a mum?”
Williams’ Sheila is definitely a maternal figure, the artist says, which is why she added a pair of breasts on either side of the statue.
“I did that on purpose. So she never has her back to you.”
Williams was inspired too by her own journey into motherhood later in life, particularly during Covid lockdowns – when she was constantly surrounded by toys and figurines. In the same moment, she says, much of the world was going through a period of reckoning with its historic statues and monuments.
“I was thinking, well, what kind of figures do we want to see up there?” Williams says. “For my daughter, I wanted her to see a powerful female figure but at the same time [Sheila] is not perfect. She’s kind of like a superhero – but she’s also not at all.
“She’s a bit … daggy.”
For Moreton Bay-based art critic Dr Louise R Mayhew, it is this combination of powerful, yet raw and real, that makes Williams’ work “exceptionally invigorating”.
“I think it’s really exciting to have something so big and so forward with its femininity, and I think it’s really exciting that it’s not pretty,” the Australian feminist art historian says.
“This is a grittier, more truthful, more exciting, more vulnerable version of femininity, and it is not something that is normally celebrated in public spaces.
“But it is very much a part of daily life, domestic life – these are the kind of bodies that we are used to at home.”
Mayhew says that while public art inevitably proves a lightning rod for vitriol and scorn, it is something Brisbane has been doing “really well of late”, with works that had “enlivened” laneways, foyers and public spaces, adding new layers of meaning and richness.
She encourages people to “spend a little bit of time” with Brisbane’s public art “without judgment” or leaping to an interpretation. To simply “take in its form” and “appreciate it as a gift” to audiences and the city.
Mayhew cites the works of Emily Floyd, Megan Cope, Leecee Carmichael, Simon Degroot and Donna Marcus as other examples of artists whose work is worth the wander.
Williams hopes her artwork will become something of a reference point for passersby.
“Hopefully people will rub her for good luck or stand underneath and get photos taken with her or say: ‘Oh, I’ll meet you down there by Sheila,’” she says.
Even Young, the YouTuber who finds the statue “really unappealing, visually” agrees Sheila is set to become a landmark.
“Oh it definitely will,” he says. “It will definitely be a talking point. This is not a safe work.”
Williams says she is prepared for Sheila to have her critics, adding the statue could be “melted down one day”.
“She can return to the Earth again, or wherever she came from, when people are sick of her,” the artist says.
But she doesn’t think that day will come anytime soon. She envisages Sheila taking on a patina with age, the shrubbery and trees growing around her so that she becomes something of a lovable “smurfette”.
“Maybe I am being naive, but I do have this sense that she will be all right, that we need and that it is OK to have some large female bodies hanging around,” Williams says.
“I think the large, lumpy lady body can have a space.”
