In 2023, Factum Arte produced a 60 cm maquette of Lady in Blue for the American artist Tschabalala Self. Three years later, the figure has grown to more than five metres in height. Selected for the Mayor of London’s Fourth Plinth Programme, the monumental Lady in Blue was unveiled in Trafalgar Square on 10 September 2026.

The transformation from maquette to monument has required a very different order of making. At 525.8 × 342.9 × 205.7 cm, the finished sculpture combines cast bronze, stainless steel, paint and hand-made glass. Translating Self’s original figure into a work capable of occupying the Fourth Plinth was not simply an exercise in enlargement, as changes in scale alter everything, from structure and weight to the behaviour of surfaces, colours and details.

Self conceived Lady in Blue as a contemporary metropolitan woman. She is not a monarch, military leader or historic figure commemorated in bronze, but an everyday figure striding purposefully through the city.

Her presence takes on particular significance in Trafalgar Square. Lady in Blue is the 16th commission in the Fourth Plinth Programme, which has transformed a pedestal originally intended for a conventional monument into one of the most prominent sites for contemporary art in the public realm.

The challenge for Factum Arte was to retain the character, gesture and immediacy of Self’s figure while radically changing its material and physical presence.

The first Lady in Blue made at Factum Arte measured approximately 62.5 cm high and weighed around 45 kg. Produced in acrylic resin with bronze powder, it was painted, patinated and waxed to establish the relationships between the different elements of the figure.

Colour was already fundamental. The blue of the dress was matched to a specific Disolac reference, while the hair was finished in matt black. Black and brown patinas and waxes were worked into the surface of the body until the required tone was achieved, with the lips and nails similarly developed through combinations of colour and wax.

The maquette was first modelled in 3D, creating a digital model from which the sculpture could be developed at monumental scale. It helped establish the physical, visual language of the work. But once Self's proposal was selected for the Fourth Plinth, the question became: how to translate a 60 cm object into a sculpture over five metres high without losing what made the original work convincing?

The final Lady in Blue is a cast bronze sculpture built around an internal stainless-steel support structure. This concealed structure gives the work the strength required at its new scale while allowing the external bronze to retain the forms established by Self.

The bronze surface was patinated and subsequently protected with Incralac lacquer. Rather than treating bronze as a single uniform surface, the sculpture combines the material qualities of patinated metal with areas of intense, applied colour.

The dress, shoes and hair were finished using high-resistance single-component polyurethane paint.

This combination of bronze and paint also places Lady in Blue in an interesting relationship with the history of public sculpture. Bronze is associated with permanence, commemoration and authority. Here it is used to give physical presence to an ordinary contemporary woman, while painted surfaces resist the visual conventions normally associated with monumental bronze.

The base presented another set of requirements. Designed for sustained outdoor exposure, it was primed with an anti-corrosion coating before receiving a water-based façade paint.

At more than five metres high, apparently secondary elements become objects in their own right.

All of Lady in Blue's jewellery was made by hand in glass. The earrings were produced in blown glass, while the ring combines faceted glass with a bronze setting.

The jewellery introduces transparency and reflected light into a sculpture otherwise dominated by bronze and opaque painted surfaces. Its production required the vocabulary of jewellery-making and glassworking to operate at an architectural scale.