Beth Cavener
also known as Beth Cavener Stichter, is an American artist based out of Montana. A classically trained sculptor, her process involves building complex metal armatures to support massive amounts of clay. Cavener is best known for her fantastical animal figures, which embody the complexity of human emotion and behavior.
Cavener achieves the highly expressive quality of her sculptures through an intensely laborious process. She extracts her figures from solid blocks of clay, every gestural passage the result of her own physical labor, and then slices them into small sections, hollowing and reworking each in order to heighten its sense of life and internal energy.
She describes her work: "The sculptures I create focus on human psychology, stripped of context and rationalization, and articulated through animal and human forms. On the surface, these figures are simply feral and domestic individuals suspended in a moment of tension. Beneath the surface they embody the impacts of aggression, territorial desires, isolation, and pack mentality."
In a series of posts i will introduce her works bit by bit