This raw contrast is relevant on a personal level to royal women. The Princess of Wales herself recounted in a 2020 interview that confronting the media outside the Lindo Wing shortly after giving birth to Prince George had been “slightly terrifying.” She had admitted to conflicting feelings and underestimating the fundamental life change which ensued, a fact Mother Vérité aims to corroborate.
Commissioned from digital scans of actual mothers for “hyper-real accuracy,” it is marketed as London’s first postpartum monument. It comes to a city in which just 4 percent of public statues represent women, fewer than are dedicated to animals.
After being shown for the first time at the Lindo Wing, Mother Vérité will be seen at Portman Square during Frieze before going on to Art Basel Miami. Eventually, says Hirschhorn, it will come back to London on long-term loan to a leading institution, to inscribe the maternal into the cultural record and “place mothers on the pedestal they deserve.”