Joseph DeLappe

Changing Ideas Award
The "Trump is a Cunt: Janey Godley Monument", is a sculptural tribute to one of the earliest
and most defiant acts of public protest against Donald Trump — Janey Godley's one
woman stand outside his Turnberry Golf Course in 2016. At a moment when much of
the world was still processing the implications of Trump's political rise, a working-class
Scottish comedian planted herself at the gates of his Ayrshire resort and said, plainly
and publicly, what many were thinking.

This work is a maquette for a proposed permanent monument to be sited at the
entrance to Turnberry — a counter-monument to wealth, impunity, and the sanitised
landscape of power. The plinth is modelled on the Burns Monument in Ayr, deliberately
invoking Scotland's tradition of honouring those who speak truth to power, while also
highlighting the shared working-class roots of Burns and Godley.

This work sits within decades of my creative practice to develop innovative projects to
creative engage art and activism, in this instance raising questions of democracy, free
expression, the right to protest, and who gets memorialised in public space. Estimates
note that only 3-4% of statues in the UK are dedicated to named women. Edinburgh
currently has 5 statues of named women as compared to 79 statues of notable men.
This work asks whose image we choose to cast in permanent form, and why. In an era
of democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism, Janey Godley's gesture —
stubborn, funny, and entirely unafraid — feels more necessary than ever.

This is part of an ongoing series entitled Action Figures, in which commercially
produced fantasy figures are remade — physically and conceptually — into monuments
to real acts of resistance. A Dr. Who character, reworked in polymer clay, epoxy putty,
and acrylic paint, becomes Janey Godley: a real woman, a real protest, a real moment
in the history of dissent.