This sculptural work is inspired by a late Victorian fire extinguisher grenade held in the Wimbledon Museum collection. Reimagined in translucent wax, the sculpture responds to the political legacy of Rose Lamartine Yates and the women of Wimbledon who played a significant role in sustaining and financing the suffrage movement.
The work explores the tension between domesticity and militancy. Originally designed to extinguish fire within the home, the grenade becomes an ambiguous symbol of both disruption and protection: an object associated with rupture, but also with the desire to extinguish inequality. Positioned between the domestic interior and the public sphere, it reflects the ways women transformed everyday spaces and objects into sites of political action.
Central to Laura Dzelzytė’s practice is the transformation of objects into more fragile materials in order to honour and preserve the ideas, memories, and histories they contain. Through the act of remaking, she shifts attention from function to meaning. Cast in wax, a material that is simultaneously vulnerable and enduring, the fire grenade becomes a contemporary monument to the women whose actions challenged existing structures of power and expanded the possibilities of political participation.