Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 51

Missing Monuments
One of the few women to be remembered with a monument in Edinburgh
is the children’s author and philanthropist, Catherine Sinclair (����-����).
Designed by John Rhind, the monument was erected in ����, and the
accompanying inscription remembers Sinclair as ‘the friend of all children’,
as well as the person responsible for Edinburgh’s first drinking fountain.
Sally Hackett’s The Fountain of Youth, playfully reinterprets a monumental
form to reflect on the absence of monuments to young people in our cities.
Made with the direct involvement of children from Tollcross Primary
School, Hackett’s fountain is encased in colourful ceramic forms. Ceramic
is not a material usually associated with traditional monuments, which
have preferred to look to more expensive materials to commemorate their
subjects. It has however long been used in outdoor shrines, perhaps most
famously in those produced by Andrea Della Robbia (����-����) at the height
of the Florentine Renaissance.
It is a fitting material, then, for a work which plays on contemporary
society’s cult of youth and celebrity. Hackett’s The Fountain of Youth gives
contemporary expression to a human desire documented as far back as the
�th century bce, when the Greek historian Herodotus recorded reports of a
miraculous fountain in the Land of the Macrobians, guaranteeing long-life
and youthful appearance to anyone who drank from it (Note �). The irony
is that while contemporary media may idolise youth (at the same time as
promoting a whole host of serums and creams which promise to help us to
retain it), our monuments still tend to honour individuals of more advanced
years.
Hackett’s fountain is installed in the courtyard garden of the Museum of
Edinburgh, formerly Huntly House, also known as ‘The Speaking House’,
for the series of advisory inscriptions mounted on its façade. These include
the customary reminders of human mortality (‘Today for me, tomorrow for
thee, why worry?’) as well as one more recent and more optimistic inscription,
added when the building was restored in ����: ‘I am old but renew my
youth’. Hackett’s playful sculpture is a tting addition to these memento mori
– a humorous reflection on contemporary society, but also a reminder to
remember future generations as much as looking to the past.
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