(1982-2007)
Sports Complex, Malvern College, Malvern
There’s no doubt that a lot of my statue visits are poignant, giving me pause to reflect and think about the course of life and how it can change so easily. With my write ups I normally scout around the internet, cross referencing and generally getting lost before throwing a bit of history together in the hope it honours the woman cited. Here, I am directly taking the text from pssauk.org website (Public Statues and Sculpture Association) where I originally gleam information on statues and made my list of the women to visit. The write up captures Katie so beautifully it would be wrong to write otherwise.
‘Katie attended Malvern College from 1994-99 and then St Edmund Hall, Oxford, but died tragically young of a brain haemorrhage at the age of twenty-five. She was a volunteer at a Quest Overseas project in Peru, where she taught sport, art, music and theatre to the children in Villa Maria, a shanty town in Lima. She was passionate about the project and following her death a fund established in her name was used to provide better living conditions for disadvantaged children and single mothers in that community.
A keen sportswoman, she is depicted in this statue as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Katie playing Netball. The memorial statue was commissioned by her parents, Kevan and Penny, to stand in her old school.’
On the day I visit there are two quotes tied to her feet from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation:
‘There are two ways of spreading light: be the candle or the mirror that reflects it’
Edith Wharton
‘Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world’.
Desmond Tutu
The inscription on Katie’s plinth is a quote from Abraham Lincoln:
‘In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years’.
WomenstatuesUK 