The sculpture, now owned by the family of Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, was cast in the Florida studio of former Walt Disney World senior art director and design chief Jim McNalis. The original greets him every day when he arrives at his studio and, he says, gives him inspiration in his work.

‘The first thing I see every morning as I enter my studio in Florida is my [original] cast of the sculpture of Aung San Suu Kyi’, said McNalis, in a message to the Festival organizers.

‘She seems to stare reflectively through the window and out over the water, reminding me on a daily basis that there is no such thing as neutrality; that if one person’s freedom is denied, the freedom of all people is in jeopardy’, said McNalis.

‘She reminds us of our responsibility to each other, a responsibility that must be honored and acted on. She reminds us that the battle for human freedom and dignity is never over. It requires our commitment and demands our active participation’.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the ‘guest director’ of the Brighton Festival 2011 which runs from May 7 to 29. This year the organizers of the popular event chose Suu Kyi and the themes of freedom of speech, human rights and freedom for political prisoners. The festival helps tell of the issues concerning Burma through the arts and includes a debate on ‘The Future of Burma’.

Although Suu Kyi will not attend for fear of not being allowed to return to Burma, the organizers say the sculpture will be an effective reminder of her presence in spirit.

McNalis, who served with the US forces in Vietnam and worked for millionaire Howard Hughes, and then went on to work for Disney Animation before going freelance, has made statues of a range of famous people including US President Barack Obama and the Rolling Stones and provided a critical portrayal of the late revolutionary Che Guevara, who is depicted with a knife behind his back.

Aung San Suu Kyi was an altogether different sculpture. McNalis created the original in 1999, made from American clay and some soil he had picked up in Burma, including dirt from near where Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time. He presented the original to the Burmese government in exile, the Washington-based National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), which gave it to the family of Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, who died in 1999, to mark his commemoration service.

McNalis cast a second copy of the original, which now stands in the NCGUB headquarters in Washington.

Lucinda Phillips, Aris’s sister and Suu Kyi’s sister-in-law, will deliver their sculpture to the festival centre on May 17 in time for a civic ceremony awarding Suu Kyi honorary citizenship of Brighton.

‘What a wonderful way of celebrating her role as guest director of the Brighton festival this year and the award to her of honorary citizen of that city’, said Phillips in a message to McNalis confirming that the sculpture would be loaned to the festival. She and her husband recently visited Suu Kyi in Rangoon.

Postcards and photocopied pictures of the sculpture are widely circulated in Burma, where McNalis has established a reputation for capturing images of other national figures in clay. They include Suu Kyi’s father, independence hero Aung San; Suu Kyi’s former lieutenant and 88 Students Generation leader Min Ko Naing, now serving a 65-year prison sentence; the late Karen military leader General Bo Mya and the individual members of Mandalay’s Moustache Brothers—while Snr-Gen. Than Shwe is represented as a pig and as the devil, hiding a meat cleaver behind his back.

McNalis smuggled rubber casts of the Moustache Brothers sculpture into Burma to enable local copies to be made of the entertainers. He is now working on a sculpture of the Burmese satirist Zarganar, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his efforts to help victims of Cyclone Nargis.

McNalis fell under the spell of Suu Kyi during his first visit to Burma in 1998. In his travels through the country her name was raised at every meeting he had with the local people.

‘The transformation of people when they spoke of her was quite remarkable’, he said, adding that energy and enthusiasm levels rose, eyes sparkled and gestures became more animated. One lady described Suu Kyi as a ‘bright star in Burma’s dark night’, he said.

Others said that for the first time they no longer felt alone in their struggle. People were strengthened by her understanding of their conditions and her sincere concern for their future.

‘They had confidence her commitment was honest and complete and were profoundly moved that she was willing to make great personal sacrifices to accomplish the goals of freedom and democracy’. He said that he often heard people say, ‘She is the only one we can really trust’.

McNalis toured Burma in search of a face for a sculpture that would symbolize the country. ‘It was becoming clear that the face of Burma that I sought for my sculpture must be the face of Aung San Suu Kyi since I saw it repeatedly and clearly reflected in the eyes of so many people’.

McNalis said he started work on the sculpture as soon as he returned to Florida—‘while the energy, the images and the spirit of the Burmese people were still powerful in my mind’.

His ambition now is to see his sculpture displayed in St. Hugh’s College at Britain’s Oxford University, where Suu Kyi studied in the late 1960s.