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At 5am yesterday, a resin statue appeared in the centre of Bristol. Edward Colston the slave trader was replaced by Jen Reid, a Black Lives Matter protester. She’d stood on the plinth on her way back from the march on 7th June. Yesterday she said “this sculpture is about making a stand for my mother, for my daughter, for black people like me”. The sculptor is Marc Quinn, whose previous work includes an inspirational statue I walked past many times that was for 2 years in Trafalgar Square: Alison Lapper Pregnant. Born with the condition phocolemia, this means that Alison has no arms and shortened legs. She has said more than once I love my body. I’m not ashamed of it at all. Much has been said since the removal of the Colston statue, about the appropriateness of public statuary and the biographies of the figures represented, and reviews have been ordered by city mayors including in London. And this comes at a time when we haven’t been, by and large, out walking past these statues in the way we used to. The statues are outdoors and we have been largely indoors. It may be that we have become both less familiar with the built environment and able to see it with fresh eyes. I hope so. One of the traps we can fall into as a society by making figures out of stone or marble is that the material itself convinces us of its permanence. But the statues of Jen Reid and Alison Lapper are in themselves expressions of the fact that the meaning of a place necessarily evolves, in part, because of the public art that populates it. A strong stand of Christian theological reflection insists that the place I am in physically, matters; and placemaking is an important aspect of collective Christian spiritual practice. In our dislocated online existence recently, we may have started to convince ourselves that we can be any place anywhere. But a Christian perspective will suggest that our disembodied interactions while highly creative sometimes, can never be fully whole. Perhaps some of the sharpness of the debate is prompted by the material itself. In order to modify a marble statue, all you can do is break it or remove it. In the Hebrew Scripture, God is sometimes described as a potter, moulding humanity, endlessly creative and recreative. From this Christians learn that human life, far from being set in stone, is, in God’s eyes, messily, gloriously, always work in progress.