Stephanie Quayle

Description

Stephanie Quayle's Tiger exemplifies her tendency to juxtapose the civility of the human domestic environment with untamed and brutal nature, 'red in tooth and claw.' Quayle achieves this 'wildness' through her use of air-drying clay, which demands a creative immediacy from the artist, resulting in a work that is both visceral and raw.

Quayle's work draws upon the incompatibility of nature and man. She frequently places her sculpted wild animals upon domestic objects; including pianos, chairs and, in the case of Tiger, a plinth. The clean lines of the highly wrought plinth, at odds with the faux naïf and scumbled surface of the tiger, is a witty comment upon the use of the plinth as a means of displaying art. The plinth is, in essence, a metaphorical cage that imposes limits upon the tiger as animal and as art object.