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Three Honours of Scotland

Shauna McMullan RSA (Born 1971)

This installation of 100 porcelain sentences is the result of the artist’s decision to take a participatory approach to creating a new public sculpture. Her process involved collaborating with ninety-nine women. Each woman was invited to do two things. First, to write a sentence in their own handwriting about a woman who had inspired them. Some women wrote about relatives or friends, while others wrote about famous living or historical women. Secondly, participants were also invited to suggest another woman to take part in the artwork. This resulted in an artwork that explores connections between women across time, place and class. As well as responding to a commission brief from the Scottish Executive’s Equalities Unit and the Scottish Parliament, the artist was also cognisant of the lack of public sculptures of women in Edinburgh and the then lack of women writers on the Canongate wall of letter-cut quotations that forms part of the Parliament building. 

The artist chose porcelain as the main material for the sculpture to demonstrate the flexible and robust qualities of porcelain, a material ordinarily associated with fragility and ideas about what constitutes femininity. 

In representing women through their voices and writing, this public sculpture celebrates women’s histories and achievements without relying on imagery of the female body.

Artist Biography

Shauna McMullan is an artist and lecturer whose work is concerned with mapping, connectivity and feminist practice.