Personal Growth is a new outdoor sculpture by Ally Rosenberg that plays with contradiction: softness and armour, fragility and threat. Upholstered bubblewrap is cast into solid, defensive forms, while sprung doorstoppers jut out like detonators, part protection, part provocation.
Drawing ironic inspiration from the Venus of Willendorf, the pocket-sized prehistoric fertility figure, Rosenberg’s sculpture reworks voluptuous, non-phallic forms to question the long association of public sculpture with masculinity, power and ego. Balancing humour with critique, Personal Growth offers a timely reimagining of what monuments, and masculinity, can signify in public space.
