Personal Growth is the first outdoor public sculpture commission by artist Ally Rosenberg. The work plays deliberately with contradiction, in particular softness and armour, fragility and threat, humour and critique.
Upholstered bubble wrap, a material associated with protection and vulnerability, is cast into solid, defensive forms. Spring doorstoppers protrude the sculpture’s surface like detonators, acting partly to safeguard and defend, and partly as provocation. The work sits in tension, appearing playful at first glance yet edged with unease.
Rosenberg draws ironic inspiration from the Venus of Willendorf a small prehistoric figurine widely associated with fertility and the female body, characterised by exaggerated, rounded forms. By reworking its voluptuous, non-phallic shapes at a monumental scale, the sculpture questions the long-standing association between public sculpture and masculinity, power and ego.
Rather than celebrating dominance or presenting monumentality as a symbol of authority, power or macho heroism, Personal Growth suggests that public sculpture can represent something gentler, more complex and more self-aware. It reframes masculinity not as rigid or heroic, but as layered, humorous and materially unstable. The work’s title carries a double meaning, referring both to emotional development of a person and growing physical, highlighting the tension between being vulnerable and putting up defences.
Balancing humour and wit with critique, Personal Growth offers a timely reimagining of what monuments, and masculinity, can signify in public space today.
