British sculptor Thomas J. Price is quietly revolutionizing public art by creating monumental bronze sculptures of ordinary Black people in prominent locations worldwide. His latest work, "Ancient Feelings," was unveiled this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney, featuring a large-scale bronze head of a Black woman with box braids and perfectly styled baby hairs cast in golden bronze.
The emotional impact of Price's work is immediate and profound. Writer Santilla Chingaipe describes breaking into tears upon first seeing renders of the Sydney sculpture during a video call with MCA curator Megan Robson. "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," Chingaipe explains.
Price, speaking from London after recent work trips to China and Canada, understands the powerful effect of scale in his sculptures. "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."
The London-born sculptor credits his artistic mother for nurturing his creativity as a child. Growing up in public housing with his mother and two brothers, Price frequently visited galleries and museums, where he noticed a stark absence of people who looked like him. "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," he recalls.
Price's path to art wasn't straightforward. He initially wanted to become a physiotherapist and even considered joining the Royal Marines, seeing the military as offering clarity and refuge to an 18-year-old. His mother quickly dissuaded him, asking pointedly: "Do you want to really go off and take orders from the people that you're at school with?" Price's response was an emphatic "Hell no."
After deciding to pursue art, Price eventually attended Chelsea College of Arts, where he created his only performance work to date, "Licked" (2001). Over three days, he licked an entire gallery wall until his tongue bled, creating a striking blood-stained wall. This work emerged during the height of the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement, though Price was critical of their approach. "I didn't like the shock stuff. None of that stuff was shocking," he says. "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 direction. "The expectation after that piece was I do another one or do something else," he explains. "But what do you do? You have to up the ante. And what I realized was that I was really interested in space and in the way that we understand space and movement within space." He went on to earn his MFA from the Royal College of Art.
Today, Price's multidisciplinary practice spans performance, video, paintings, photography, and animation, though he's best known for his large-scale figurative bronze sculptures capturing everyday Black life. He describes his work as "an exercise in restraint," featuring fictional characters that are amalgamations of different sources rather than specific individuals. These figures are portrayed in poses not traditionally associated with sculpture.
Price's monumental works gained significant attention at the National Gallery of Victoria's 2023 Triennial, which featured "All in" (2021) and "Reaching out" (2020) in the atrium. These sculptures depict characters of African descent in strikingly ordinary poses: a woman with her hair in a bun looking down at her phone, and a man in sweatpants and a hoodie standing confidently with hands in his pockets.
The ordinariness of these figures is precisely what makes them radical. "Black bodies have historically been subjected to surveillance, hyper-sexualization and policing, and this continues now. Very rarely are we permitted to just be," the article notes. These works refuse to perform a version of Black excellence, instead insisting that being seen as simply human can be profoundly affirming.
Price didn't fully understand his work's power until he witnessed Black people's reactions in public spaces. He recalls a pivotal moment in London in 2017 while installing aluminum heads. Two Black families noticed the sculptures, with 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 aware of his work's particular significance for people of African descent, Price emphasizes he doesn't create with a specific 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," he explains.
Placing ordinary Black characters in historically exclusionary spaces is inherently radical, challenging assumptions about power and who deserves memorialization. This creates discomfort, and Price's works often generate conversations that some describe as "controversial." The controversy centers on a simple question: why should large-scale ordinary Black characters cast in bronze be allowed to occupy public space?
Earlier this year, a four-meter statue of a Black woman was unveiled in Times Square in New York, generating both celebration and anger. Price is attuned to these varied responses. "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."
Price finds the assumptions viewers place on his work 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 labeling 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."
This leads to polarized reactions: "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." For Price, this commentary remains central to his work's purpose.
Price creates his work during challenging times, with rising populism and far-right nationalism in the West and swift rollbacks of equity measures for historically marginalized people. This context adds urgency to his practice. "They're trying to normalize bigotry," he says. "They're trying to normalize this scapegoating and normalize 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."
MCA museum director Suzanne Cotter reports that the Sydney sculpture hasn't prompted 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 color, of different cultural and racial origins. It's just not controversial at all."
Price's sculpture inaugurates the museum's new yearly series, the Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission, inviting Australian and international contemporary artists to create ambitious sculptural works. Cotter, who discovered Price's work at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne, calls his selection serendipitous. During a 24-hour Sydney stopover en route to Melbourne, Price stood with his gallerist in front of the MCA and declared, "This would be an amazing place to have one of my sculptures."
The location carries deep historical significance. The Tallawoladah Lawn, commonly known as The Rocks, was once home to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, for whom colonization brought dispossession, displacement, and decimation. As Canadian curator and academic Julie Crooks notes, placing "Ancient Feelings" in this context 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."
Price places responsibility with viewers and their chosen responses. "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."
Price carefully considers his responses to questions, aware that both his work and he as an artist might be misunderstood. He carries the burden of being one of the few Black sculptors creating work for global audiences at grand scale, along with the pressures of such visibility. "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."
Regarding his decision to center a Black woman in Sydney Harbour, Price explains: "I just chose the character I thought would create a lot of potential points of connection with viewers. 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."
