With their serene poses, beautiful curves and arms often enfolding pregnant bellies, these figurines celebrate the miracle of fertility. Sadly, I saw them during protests about violence against women

Tall, thin, small, wide, or shaped like a violin. Lying down, standing up, arms folded or looking up to the stars. Male, female, intersex or abstracted. Alone or in groups, drinking, or playing music. All these descriptions came to mind last week when I came into contact with some of the earliest known Greek figurine sculptures, known as Cycladic art.

Marble white – although originally painted – the Cycladic figures date from the Neolithic to early Bronze Age, around 5300–2300BC. They were sculpted in cultures based in the circular cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea known as the Cyclades. What began as pebble-shaped figurines grew into a great variety of shapes and sizes, sometimes with coiled hair and eyes drawn atop little wedge noses, and occasionally playing instruments.

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Ane Freed-Kernis used her pension to build a workshop where she could create the tactile, surprising sculptures of her dreams

In 2019, after retiring from her career as a social worker, Ane Freed-Kernis decided to build a home workshop and devote all of her free time to stone carving. “It’s really therapeutic and completely absorbing,” she says. “I might be covered head to toe in dust but I’m happy – it was something I needed more of in my life when I hit 60.”

This fascination has its roots in Freed-Kernis’ childhood. Growing up on her father’s farm in Denmark, she used to wander through the fields with her gaze fixed on the ground, looking for stones to add to her collection. “I’ve always been drawn to the shapes and textures of stones,” she says.

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Climbable sculpture in Hudson Yards in Manhattan closed in 2021 after four people died by suicide

The Vessel, the huge climbable centerpiece of New York’s upmarket Hudson Yards development that saw a number of suicides, is set to reopen later this year with new safety features, according to developers.

The 150ft sculpture, designed by Thomas Heatherwick and built at a cost of $260m, was closed three years ago after four people jumped to their deaths. Besides overall criticism of its design – including descriptions of it as a giant gold shish-kebab rotisserie – the construction was grimly described to the Guardian as “staircase to nowhere”.

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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Only in Birmingham could a statue of King Kong be lost twice. The city’s relationship with its cultural history is complicated

Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them ? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official encouragement. In 2020, the director Michael Cumming and I completed King Rocker (“One of my all time favourite rock docs” – Mark Kermode; “the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the Scotsman ), which interwove the tale of typically self-effacing Birmingham post-punks the Nightingales with that of a giant piece of neglected Birmingham public art. Nicholas Monro’s King Kong, an 18ft-high fibreglass ape, was a ferocious presence in a brutalist sunken square in Birmingham, subtly mirroring his namesake’s annoyance with the art deco architecture of 30s New York. In the King Kong movie, beauty killed the beast. But the giant ape I loved as a child was murdered by Birmingham. Twice.

Hated by 1970s regional-news-television talking-head Brummies and sold into nomadic slavery by the ignorant city fathers only months after it was unveiled in 1972, the stupendous ape was eventually rediscovered in 2016, and critically rehabilitated, by Leeds’s Henry Moore Institute. Like all great Birmingham geniuses, Kong had to go elsewhere to get recognised. But for many Brummies, Birmingham’s fear of getting above itself is one of the region’s most endearing traits. The alternative, of course, is being Manchester, the city equivalent of an endlessly farting dog that expects nauseated passersby to applaud.

King Rocker is newly available to stream . Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf opens in London in December before a national tour

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Serpentine Gallery, London
From colonial leaders dressed in trippy patterns to a library of historical conflicts, this delightful show brings a welcome wit and rationality to today’s angry debates

It looks like a happy ending. After the disputes and all the agonising, Yinka Shonibare CBE offers a witty, weirdly beautiful conclusion to the debate over public statues that has raged since Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol four years ago . Except I don’t think Shonibare is interested in conclusions.

Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Kitchener – they’re all here, a gallery of famous and less famous icons of Britain’s imperial past. Their statues from public places in the capital have been reproduced, not monumental size but human height. They have also been removed from their plinths and brought down to earth. And each statue has been covered in the bright multicoloured Dutch wax prints that are Shonibare’s multicultural pop art trademark. These ravishing textiles, made in the Netherlands (and at one time Manchester) to sell in Africa since the 19th century and still doing a roaring trade, symbolise in Shonibare’s work the inauthenticity and complexity of culture and identity in a globalised capitalist world. Now they turn patriotic statues into something new and unimaginable to the dead people they represent.

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At 11, the artist was struck with a condition that paralysed him from the neck down. His new exhibition recalls years of hospitals, family love, and fighting with cinema managers

In the exhibition Jason and the Adventure of 254, there’s a sculpture of runner Sebastian Coe’s body with a TV for a head. This freezes in time the moment that the artist Jason Wilsher-Mills was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition: at 2:54pm at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, while watching Coe win a gold medal in the 1500m race at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Wilsher-Mills would spend the next five years paralysed from the neck down due to polyneuropathy and chronic fatigue syndrome , diseases that affect mobility and attack the immune system. In the centre of the show at London’s Wellcome Collection is a vast sculpture of the artist as a child in a hospital bed, as toy soldiers move towards his body – a metaphor that doctors used to explain to him that his white blood cells were attacking, rather than defending, his own body.

Jason and the Adventure of 254 is at the Wellcome Collection, London , until 12 January

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Alex Lidagovsky was forced to leave Ukraine with his family when his studio was bombed during the Russian invasion

A Ukrainian sculptor who fled to the UK when his studio was destroyed has been accepted into the Royal Society of British Artists.

Alex Lidagovsky was forced to leave Kyiv with his wife, Dasha Nepochatova, and 16-year-old stepdaughter after the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.

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From cowboy boots to Le Corbusier armchairs, miniature sculptures made of butter are having a moment

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The Easter bunny is waiting in the wings and the hot cross buns are ready to be toasted. But have you moulded your butter into the shape of a Doric or Ionic pillar yet? Thankfully, there is still time.

Butter moulds and sculptures are enjoying a moment – the sky’s the limit and butter maestros have shared pictures of butter in the shape of cowboy boots , chateaus and Le Corbusier armchairs on social media. Late last year, influencer and consummate host Laura Jackson called it “ the trend of the moment ” – but with the butter mould showing no signs of melting from the ether, it feels a fitting time to find out what’s going on in the dairy aisle, and beyond.

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In the past nine years, the musician and artist has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a shocking, deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning

Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland , who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave , came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs ( Into My Arms , Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree , Ghosteen and Carnage . He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage ), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files ), screenwriter ( The Proposition ) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

‘These losses are incorporated into the artistic flow’ … Cave’s sculptures go through the glazing process. Photograph: courtesy of Liv & Dom

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