Surrounded by fields, trees and wind turbines, a new work of art is causing excitement in the Hildesheim district. A statue showing a naked woman has recently stood on the side of the road on federal highway 494 near Hohenhameln-Bründeln, northeast of the district town. Not everyone in the town with 164 residents likes that.

“Someone says like that, someone says that,” said a resident. She finds the work “not unpleasant”. Is there a need for a fertility goddess, as the work is sometimes called? “More children would be nice, then there would be more life in the village,” she said.

Another resident said: “Art enriches the world, in the bad world we already have.” Another said he didn’t think much of it, even though he could respect the artistic work. Another said: “Basically, I don’t care at all.”

Why the figure has “plump shapes”.

The figure, carved from stone, including its base, measures a total of 6.20 meters. It weighs 20 tons and shows a “heavily pregnant woman with plump shapes”. Some things are deliberately exaggerated so that the striking red color of the stone, which comes from near Salzburg, does not take up all the attention.

The work could be described as a fertility goddess, not least because of the fertile soil in the region on which the sculpture stands. But sculptor Dieter Homeyer prefers to leave the concrete meaning of his work “Mea Dea” to others, he told the German Press Agency.

The artist said he received consistently positive reactions from women. They could be summarized, among other things, with the statement: “Finally a woman is shown in the deformed form of pregnancy and not in the idealized form of the male imagination.”