The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 36

While this one seems relaxed, Cavener likes hares as a

sexuality) she has purloined and represented. For this

subject because they are so powerful and swift; there is

reason the artist will rarely reveal her subjects.

hardly a more anxiety-ridden organism on the planet.
In captivity they can live for ten years, in nature most
do not make it to the first year and a two-year-old hare
is rare. Cavener says that everything about the wild
hare, mind and body, is a development in reaction to an
ever-present fear. Rabbits are born with their eyes closed.
Hares are born with theirs wide open and fearful, with
fur, and ready to run, literally from womb to tomb.

THE EARTH FIGURE
Now the painted figure is behind us and we have arrived
at the feet of Earth Mother. This is a singular part of the
collection where the material—clay, earth, mud—has
a particularly powerful influence on meaning, context,
and primal matter. Here figures are born of clay. Time
and place is unknown except that it feels very distant

While L’Amante has a languorous pose, its musculature

and prehistoric. The mood is serious. If there is humor

betrays inner tension. It is as though at any second the

it comes via paradox or pathos. And as much as this

offer of love may be withdrawn in fear and distrust. This

group of art traffics in primal humanity, it also has

sense of a taut inner wiring comes from the process

an unemotional, unapologetic closeness to death.

by which Cavener’s figures are made. Often process
is of little impor tance except to the maker, but in this
case it is instructive. At first Cavener’s sculpture is made
out of solid clay. It cannot be fired in this state and so
the artist painstakingly begins a process of hollowing
out the form. A section of the form is sliced off and
hollowed, then a second slice goes through the same
process and the two are attached. The technique has a
second purpose. As she proceeds, Cavener begins to
pull lightly at the clay to create the elongated striation

Robert Brady’s Ancestor (1981–1982) is a good case in
point. The figure, a corpse, is removed from its horizontal
resting place and shifted into a vertical position. The
black glaze and slip and the fierce heat of the kiln,
which can be sensed with this sculpture, tell us that
this body has been burnt, both literally and figuratively.
One supposes that it was post-mortem: the position
is calm, at peace, and shows no trauma. We do not
know what this figure is telling us, we can only read
the clues and they are encased in an image of death.

of muscle and sinew that gives her beasts their feel of a
readiness to flee and of muscle on alert, awaiting threat.

Travelling back in time (paradoxically, before man) is
more radical in the case of Stephen De Staebler. His

Yet, one must not lose track of the fact that L’Amante
is the portrait of a human being and not a generic
being, but a specific person that the artist knows
and whose psychological characteristics (including

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works in ceramics, Standing Figure with Quartered
Torso (1985) and bronze, Winged Woman Stepping
(1992), have the effect of turning beings into rock. This is
essentially what happens when clay is fired. A chemical