Waxwork of Virginia Woolf comes to University Of Sussex

A unique, life-sized waxwork of Virginia Woolf has found a new permanent home at the University of Sussex, arriving in the centenary year of Woolf's famous work, Mrs Dalloway,

The University of Sussex is a natural home for Woolf’s likeness. It also holds the Monks House Papers, a major archive of her letters, manuscripts and press cuttings, which reflects the region’s deep ties to Woolf and the Bloomsbury set.

Originally created in 2015 by sculptor Eleanor Crook, “Wax Virginia” was first displayed at King’s College London. She is now featured in the exhibition Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf, open at the University’s Library Exchange, which runs until Sun 29 Sept.

“Virginia Woolf was famously critical of universities as bastions of male privilege,” said Dr Helen Tyson, Associate Professor at Sussex. “But in her 1938 essay Three Guineas, she imagined a new kind of ‘experimental college’ where ‘society was free’ and all kinds of minds could co-operate. It feels especially meaningful to welcome her likeness here, alongside her archive, at a university born of a similar postwar vision.”

Alongside ‘Wax Virginia’, the exhibition showcases a bold mix of contemporary works inspired by Woolf's work as a writer and publisher, including Norwegian artist Ane Thon Knutsen’s Mapping Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, a collective hand-printed response to a long modernist poem by Nancy Cunard that was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their Hogarth Press in 1925.  

To by A T Kabe Wilson is inspired by a pencil sketch of a lighthouse in the Charleston archive and forms part of the artist’s ongoing creative engagement with Bloomsbury and Sussex modernists.

Michelle Abbott’s 4 Beautiful Obscenities of Virginia Woolf is part of an ongoing project of abstracted sewn insults, reinventing Woolf’s own insults through embroidery.  

In Yâdigar I (Keepsake I) and Yâdigar II (Keepsake II), Can Akgümüş creates a dialogue between Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography and two eighteenth-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour.  

Similarly inspired by Woolf’s Orlando, Jane Hyslop’s artist’s book, The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity, comprises a series of drawings and pochoir prints.  

Andrea Mindel’s Madame Defarge goes Bloomsbury is a series of dissident embroideries made in response to Woolf’s writing.  

The exhibition also includes a selection of translations of writings by Virginia Woolf from a collection held by the University of Sussex Library.

Curated by the Centre for Modernist Studies, co-directed by Dr Tyson and Dr Hope Wolf, Pressing Matters runs in parallel with the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted at Sussex from Sat 5 – Tues 8 July 2025.

Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf runs at The University Of Sussex’s Library Exchange until Sun 29 Sept 2025.

www.sussex.ac.uk

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