The poised Suffragette rises as a slender serifed I in toughened glass and jet-black ink. Reflecting the viewer, the room and the world outside, the upright I-form embodies an autonomy that extends beyond the self. As text, the first-person pronoun asserts the presence of 'a person’, a status hard won in Aotearoa New Zealand by nineteenth-century suffragists who challenged the laws and systems denying women equal rights. Those rights were available only to 'a person', a legal category defined to exclude the female sex.

The sculpture projects the power of that first women’s movement into the present tense. The film of jet-black ink evokes the quill signatures of 25,000 women who signed petitions to New Zealand's Parliament demanding the vote, and the ballot marks of 90,290 women who voted for the first time in 1893, each mark an individual act accumulating collective force. The first-person pronoun also recalls the second-wave feminist tenet 'the personal is political', while the figure's androgyny reclaims 'I' as gender-free.

As the Roman numeral for One, the I-form records Aotearoa New Zealand’s leadership as the first nation to grant the vote to all women, Māori and Pākehā, regardless of property status. Read aloud, the I-sculpture speaks assent: the English "aye" and te reo Māori "āe", echoing the parliamentary voices that make new law. Carrying past, present and future tenses, Suffragette becomes a sovereign text that asserts and holds ground, its reflective surface including every-one.

The edition remains open: there can be no limit to the number of suffragettes.