On Windrush Day, Thomas J Price’s new statue honours a generation of immigrants

When he grew up in London, the Hackney Empire loomed large in Thomas J Price’s imagination — the theatre was a beacon for black culture in a borough rich in African-Caribbean communities. It feels fitting, then, that Price, now a sculptor, has installed a permanent work outside Hackney town hall just across from the Empire, commemorating the lives and contributions of people who emigrated from Caribbean countries to the UK between 1948 and 1971. They include Price’s paternal grandmother, who travelled from Jamaica to work as a nurse.

On June 22, Hackney council will unveil Price’s “Warm Shores”, a pair of sculptures honouring the Windrush generation, named after those who arrived on the Empire Windrush ship 74 years ago to help fill postwar labour shortages and to forge a new life in Britain. The ship’s name has become synonymous with the people who arrived from the Caribbean in the two decades that followed, and June 22 is now celebrated as Windrush Day, marking the ship’s arrival at Tilbury docks in Essex.

Price, 40, collaborated with the borough’s local Windrush community and their descendants so they could see themselves in the work in a literal and contributive way. He took 3D scans of 30 residents, who ranged in age from 20 to 91 years old, and incorporated elements of their images into the final sculptures of a male and female figure.

“They’re part of it,” says the animated and engaging Price as we sit in a quiet room in the London offices of his gallery, Hauser & Wirth. “They had to understand it so they could be the ones who introduce the work. They’re going to take ownership of it. They’re going to be the guardians of it.” Making the scans gave Price the opportunity to ask the residents questions about Windrush, to hear how it felt to be connected with it and what it is like to be black and living in Hackney, one of London’s most diverse boroughs.

The statue, commissioned in a partnership with producer Create London, comes during a tense period. It is part of the council’s effort to support the Windrush generation, members of which have been wrongly detained or deported under hostile government policies. Veronica Ryan’s monumental sculptures of Caribbean fruit, cast in bronze or carved in marble, sit not far from Price’s work and are another part of this commitment. They are the first permanent public sculptures in the UK to commemorate Windrush.

Standing around nine feet in height, Price’s figures depict a black man and woman in simple clothes the artist hopes will help the work transcend fads and time. The woman’s hair is cropped short and curly in texture while the man’s is longer and braided into cornrows. Price says his choice highlights common styles worn by people across the black diaspora, who have long faced discrimination and hostile remarks about their hair. Price can relate: “I remember having [cornrows] as a student and getting absolutely ridiculed for it. I just shaved my head. I was just like, ‘I can’t deal with this.’”

“Warm Shores” marks a departure from Price’s previous work by depicting more than one figure and by partially basing the works on real people. Usually his sculptures are of fictional characters, stimulating questions about who they could be, why they are there and, more broadly, how these objects function in public spaces. “The reason they’re fictionalised is to refute or to critique, and to put a spotlight on, the power structures that exist within portraiture,” he says.

Price purposely does not place his statues on plinths, which can imply a hierarchical relationship between the subject and the viewer. His works remain on the same level as us, even as their large scale maintains a sense of monumentality. “You’re looking up because the figure is large, not because the figure has been placed high,” he says. “Perceived human scales play with our sense of who we are and can make us either uncomfortable or comforted.”

Earlier in his career, Price created busts and smaller three-foot figures. His first large-scale work was “Network” (2013), a nine-foot sculpture of a black man casually looking at his mobile phone. He revisits this character in “The Distance Within” (2021), which is installed in New York’s Marcus Garvey Park as part of Thomas J Price: Witness, his first solo US show, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The figure stands in the midst of a buzzing community that swirls around him, but he appears to be oblivious, absorbed in his phone.

By allowing his figures mobile phones, he gives characters their own world to occupy. The artist intentionally draws on everyday moments, and this choice works like a pressure release, to free up how public works can look and relate to viewers.

Revisiting characters in different poses and clothing enables Price to experiment with how his figures are perceived, with the continuity of the character functioning like a control, or consistent element. His face lights up in a eureka moment when discussing this comparison.

“I guess that’s my whole practice, actually,” he says. “It’s this idea of shifting the art with a control — with various controls. I run these parallel works. I shift elements to see what happens and to see what we do. It’s an experiment.”

This spirit of exploration and curiosity underpins the way he engages with issues relating to black identity and representation in contemporary society. It’s intelligent and impactful. “I think as an artist, what I’m trying to be is vulnerable and not have all the answers all the time,” he says. “It’s an experiment and it takes time.”

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‘Thomas J Price: Witness’ runs at The Studio Museum, New York, to October 1, studiomuseum.org