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Sculptor Jennifer Mann is obsessed with faces and recreating them, so much so she studied the intricacies of facial reconstruction from the people who teach the FBI.

“Building up from the skull, all of the musculature of the face, that’s one side of it, you have to be anatomically and proportionally correct,” she says, adding that those insights significantly impacted her work.

Jennifer Mann says there’s an X-factor in what makes a sculpture resonate.Credit: Simon Schluter

The Macedon Ranges-based artist makes sculptures and statues of real life people. While not averse to the idea of Premier Daniel Andrews being commemorated in bronze, Mann would instead love to see Joan Kirner celebrated, the state’s first female premier and longtime advocate for women’s rights.

In Australia, statues of people generally celebrate those in power, which is why there are more statues of animals than women; less than 2 per cent of public statues in Victoria are of real-life women.

Mann argues our perception of what is worth celebrating should change: she wants to see values other than power honoured. Instead of statues related to war or sporting prowess or power, we should explore other ways in which people contribute to society and recognise them.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard (right) with Kristine Ziwica and Professor Clare Wright from A Monument of One’s Own and the statue of activist Zelda D’Aprano created by Mann at Trades Hall.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“The language of sculpture and seeing a life-sized statue of a person doesn’t have to be tied to power, it could be other values that we want to remember and honour in our society, someone like for example Mother Teresa. Our society is not just about power, it’s all sorts of wonderful things that people do, whose lives were devoted to things that we value.”

Mann sees a strong appetite for statues but to date sadly not for those of women. “What’s really good now is there appears to be a huge groundswell of support for the idea of statue equality. Why shouldn’t we be looking around our public spaces and seeing inspirational women as well as men? Our public spaces should represent all of us as a society. When you scratch the surface and start to look at the histories of our amazing women, Vida Goldstein is a shining star but there are so many.”

That said, in some quarters people have gone off statues because they think it’s a white tradition that smacks of colonialism, Mann says, adding that the art form is far more than that.

Top of her list to immortalise in bronze would be Indigenous leader and advocate Louisa Briggs, who the City of Melbourne plans to commemorate. Her most recent work sits outside Trades Hall, a life-sized statue to honour feminist activist Zelda D’Aprano.

Mann’s bronze of jockey Hughie Cairns in Caufield is a memorial to all fallen jockeys.Credit: Jennifer Mann

“People say they stood in front of Zelda and were moved by it,” she says. “I’ve struck a chord in the humanity of the viewer, it’s all part of what the genre should do; it’s a human thing. It’s connecting, engaging, all of those things.”

The Zelda statue was the brainchild of historian Claire Wright and Kristine Ziwica, who founded A Monument Of One’s Own to address that imbalance.

“If the face can engage the viewer to be curious about who this person was, then I’ve done my job.”

Sculpture as an art form goes back thousands of years and many works celebrate different priorities. Michaelangelo’s marble sculpture Pieta, depicting Mary and Jesus – a work that moved Mann to tears when she saw it in real life at the St Peter’s Basilica in Rome – is about compassion, an homage to a mother and child. “Whereas his David was about power, Pieta wasn’t.”

The Etruscans, the original Tuscans, featured full-length sculptures of family groups on their sarcophagi, a husband and wife, possibly with a child, which Mann says are incredibly moving, reflecting the significance with which they saw familial love.

Mann says how we read faces is complex, even when they’re bronze or marble statues. Once the anatomy is correct, she aims to capture the essence of a person. “A good likeness in sculptures of people’s faces depends on an X-factor that comes from within the sculptor,” she says. “It’s hard to describe, but a good likeness is something that everyone recognises.”

“If the face can engage the viewer to be curious about who this person was, then I’ve done my job, because that’s what I want, people to Google or look up who this person was,” she says. “So sure, the name can be big on the front, but really what they represented has to be something that people are curious about when they view my sculpture.”

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