St Mary’s Hospital, where Kate Middleton gave birth, unveils London’s first postpartum statue

A dramatic new bronze statue, Mother Vérité, is eliciting an essential debate about the nature of postpartum life after its recent unveiling at St Mary’s Hospital’s Lindo Wing—the very steps where Kate Middleton and other royal mums have introduced their newborns to the world.

Raw postpartum statue challenges royal image at Lindo Wing

The seven-foot-tall statue is an uncompromising juxtaposition to the notoriously smooth royal birth notices. Commissioned by parenting company Frida and designed by British sculptor Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark, the piece shows a new mum holding her baby as she wears disposable postpartum pants, a still-distended stomach and other bodily realities such as stretch marks and a Linea Negra.

Frida CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn said the monument aims to “honour a woman’s physical transformation” and make the “invisible work” of motherhood visible. The statue’s location is no accident; it directly challenges the unattainable perfection often associated with the Lindo Wing, where new mothers have appeared in heels and full makeup mere hours after birth.

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.”