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The limestone statue of the diamond trader, imperialist and racist Cecil Rhodes that adorns the façade of Oxford’s Oriel College (where only one Black British A-level student has been admitted since 2010) has an impossibly large head This kind of synecdochical oversizing of the head, and often the hands too, has a long heritage in classical sculpture: Michelangelo’s David is but one example A large head contains an expansive mind; large hands do great things Rhodes’s supersized finger points outwards and toward a prosperous future for the ‘finest race in the world’, which – according to him – was the Anglo-Saxon race But this hand also points downwards to where he would have fallen, had Oriel College not rejected campaigners’ call to remove the statue   To build individuals in stone is to ask the landscape to be forever defined by them To build individuals in stone is to submit to a belief in the unwavering infallibility of genius, of bravery, of accomplishment For many, tearing down statues is a Soviet thing, an Isis thing, a totalitarian-authoritarian thing; it is extreme, whereas Oxford, they think, is not   Nicolas Party, the Swiss artist whose site-specific installation Speakers is currently on show at Modern Art Oxford’s Piper Gallery, reads the city’s architecture as imbued with ‘a masculine energy’ In response, Party has sculpted five enormous women’s heads to acknowledge the work of the city’s notable women Two metres high and like milliner’s dummies, the heads were designed on 3D-printers before being fashioned from plaster and placed inside the small gallery, whose walls have been painted orange Vibrancy is Party’s strength: he is known for his bright, blobby still lifes and landscape paintings One head has a violet face and slick green hair, another is Pepto-Bismol pink with raspberry lips The women look out in different directions, and on closer inspection, their apparently neutral expressions admit boredom, wry amusement, incredulity   Speakers is based on the Emperor Heads, thirteen stone busts that encircle Oxford’s seventeenth-century Sheldonian Theatre The identities of the busts remain unknown, and while their laurel wreaths might make them philosophers or apostles, enigmatic Oxford