| Ceramist Beth Cavener Stichter’s recent series, On Tender Hooks, may at first glance give an impression that it’s intended to shock. Stichter’s intent, however, is to provoke self-examination through exploration of human psychology as presented in an animal form. On Tender Hooks forces the audience to question personal conventions and human nature as a whole: “Why am I reacting in this way?” “Who are we?” Her sculptures force self-confrontation, and exploration of basic human interaction that doesn’t involve words or even action, but emotion. Stichter’s feeble farm animal subjects invite empathy. |  |
Dominique Ward
Ceramist Beth Cavener Stichter’s recent series, On Tender Hooks, may at first glance give an impression that it’s intended to shock. Stichter’s intent, however, is to provoke self-examination through exploration of human psychology as presented in an animal form. On Tender Hooks forces the audience to question personal conventions and human nature as a whole: “Why am I reacting in this way?” “Who are we?” Her sculptures force self-confrontation, and exploration of basic human interaction that doesn’t involve words or even action, but emotion.
Stichter’s feeble farm animal subjects invite empathy. Amalgamated variations of goats, felines, and rabbits, creatures generally seen as helpless innocents, victims of circumstance and surroundings, unable to protect themselves. Instead of presenting them as cute innocents, Stichter strips them down to the most basic of human emotions—fear, rage, apathy, love, alienation—causing a reaction of not just empathy, but identifying with the emotional state of the animal. These intrinsically human experiences are shown through gentle creatures that seemingly have no way to either protect themselves from their experience, or do anything to relieve themselves of it.
Images of rabbits with contorted faces and seized muscles in limbs, frozen almost in a state of shock at being discovered, depict a feeling of panic and anxiety. The works in On Tender Hooks is almost jarring and slightly uncomfortable at the instant when viewers become aware that they’re witnessing something incredibly personal. Stichter is exposing a private moment, as if viewers walked into something that wasn’t meant to be seen, and there’s no way out. This realization almost immediately evokes a feeling of embarrassment followed by one’s questioning of the validity of that feeling.
Stichter explores archaic characterizations of human behavior by grouping the exhibition based on the Greek idea of the Four Humors: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Essentially On Tender Hooks is the oversimplification of complex human emotions and personality into four basic ideas as portrayed by animal images. A Rush of Blood to the Head, a highlight of those grouped as sanguine (passionate, bold, impulsive), and the centerpiece of the exhibition, is a sculpture depicting two goats in a passionate kiss with erections. Though erections are part of our animalistic sexual nature, the kiss shared between the goats is something profoundly human. Stichter places sexual nature at the center of her exhibition as if forcing the audience to question, or realize, the occurrence of homosexuality in animals other than humans while once again displaying a moment that seems too personal to witness.
These animals’ emotions are shown raw, stripped of whatever instinct existent in human nature or society, hidden behind whatever is fond. On Tender Hooks examines everything that is arguably human nature, and provides the audience an opportunity to take an in-depth look at what lies beneath the surface of things, what ties humanity together. The personal, private moments that are too precious, even dehumanizing to share, are put in the forefront, in a surprisingly self-identifying way.
