The next commission of public art for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth will be unveiled soon, so there are just a few days left to see the current occupant, a giant ice cream.
It’s apt that the ice cream will spend its final week on the plinth during a heat wave, although it won’t melt, but will be removed by workmen. Officially called The End, the ice cream by Heather Phillipson, will be on the plinth until Monday 15th August 2022.
The ice cream is being replaced with Antelope, a sculpture that restages a photograph of a Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley.
The photograph was taken in 1914 at the opening of Chilembwe’s new church in Nyasaland, now Malawi. Chilembwe is wearing a hat, defying the colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people. A year later he led an uprising against colonial rule. Chilembwe was killed and his church, which had taken years to build, was destroyed by the colonial police.
In Samson Kambalu’s work, Chilembwe will be almost twice the size of Chorley, reversing the implied authority that exists in the photograph.
The new sculpture will be unveiled on Wednesday 14th September.