Along the Honky Tonk Highway, almost nothing is still. Feverish L.E.D lights branch out from patriotic bars that loiter on Nashville’s famous Broadway strip and flash above a torrent of faux cowboys and bachelorette parties. The wah-wah of country music spits out from the open windows of country music bars and hovers around an agitating crowd whose attention is held by something else; the statue of a cowgirl. 

Erected in bronze that has oxidised and faded to a patina blue, a guitar has been welded between her stiff hands. Beneath her cowgirl hat, two brass braids rest on either side of a smirk that has been etched into metal. A child drops a single bill into a plastic bucket positioned before the cowgirl and suddenly out of nowhere the statue’s brass posture cracks and she bows to thank the generous visitor. 

Leigh Ann DeLoach (professionally known as Colorful Cowgirl), aged 41 and born thirty minutes outside of New Orleans currently derives her entire income from pretending to be a statue. DeLoach had always wanted to be a street performer when she came across a 2013 TEDTalk on YouTube from a former living statue, Amanda Palmer. At the time, DeLoach had been working as an aerial dancer in a circus in Chicago. 

“She just tells her journey of being a living statue and it was amazingly gorgeous and I cried and I watched it four times and I was like, alright, I’m going to be a living statue,” DeLoach tells me over the phone from her current stop in Illinois. 

DeLoach set out to buy cheap metallic paint and created her first statue, the Colorful Cowgirl. Designed to attract crowds in the major party cities of the American South, DeLoach smears her face in patina blue to match her western gun-slinging costume; “I do it in the Statue of Liberty colour because it’s the South and people are very fucking proud to be Americans in the South.” 

On her first day, DeLoach made $150 and after several weeks quit her job, bought a cheap van and spent the last six years travelling the breadth of the United States just to stand still. In doing so, DeLoach has become part of a centuries-long tradition of living statue buskers around the world. Busking as statues is simply the modern variation of an art form that has ranged from static cinema scenes called “tableau vivant” and P.T Barnum’s reprehensible circus shows in the nineteenth century to a loophole in nudity censure laws in life theatre in England in the century after. 

The exact spot that DeLoach chooses to stand on is heavily calculated. Party cities like Nashville guarantee heavy foot traffic which equates to financial gain but also brings increased risks of danger to DeLoach. She tells me sexual abuse in party cities is frequent, grabbing and touching parts of her body.

“At first I would get frustrated and sometimes say something and break character and be like ‘are you fucking serious.’ Or grab their hand. But then everyone around would get pissed off at me and be like, ‘Oh my God, you can’t take a joke?’ That kind of shit.” She said, “and so then I would joke or wiggle my ass, or make funny movements about it, and people were throwing 20s in my tip jar. At that point, it gets to where it’s like, am I fucking dropping my morals right now? For money?”

Though, it is clear that despite the severity of each bad experience DeLoach has when working, the good outweighs the bad. “There’s these really genuine interactions, sometimes literally involving tears. And like, extreme appreciation for the artwork, and sometimes that trumps making the money anyway.” DeLoach said. 

Keeping an eye on those around her is not the only thing that DeLoach thinks about for the hours that she pretends to be a statue. Inevitably, standing still puts strain on her body. 

“What I’m thinking about is: don’t think about the pain,” she said. To combat stiffness, DeLoach invents reasons to move. She bows to spectators who put money in her jar, winks at others and tips her
cowgirl hat. 

DeLoach is confident in her justification for why she pretends to be a statue for a living despite the harassment and strain on her body. “I don’t want to work for people, I don’t like working for people, I like making my own schedule. I’ve always had this sort of vagabond life.” 

Relying on statuing as her sole form of income is the only thing stopping DeLoach from staying a statue forever. Though, she doesn’t know what an additional avenue of income could look like yet. 

“I do love it but sometimes too when it’s the only means of income I have and your body hurts it can be a bit gruelling so to find something else to split my time with to make money would be ideal… if I can do that then I would do it forever.”
While the Colorful Cowgirl is a cosplay of American iconography, DeLoach herself inadvertently personifies the current state of the land of the free. Jostling for street corners she negotiates America’s gluttonous housing crisis. She trades time with others who claim ownership of the pavement on street corners, broadways, and outside shop-fronts. Like them, she asks for money. Painted in liberty blue, she uses her body for capital but she alone decides when she works and when she is done. And when she is done, she leaves in a mobile homebound to nothing except a surface for its tyres to roll on. She drives to no particular destination, returning only to stillness when money runs out.