Why look at Beth Cavener's Animals?

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The caves at Lascaux or Chauvet. The stencils of horses, mammoths, lions, bears, bison, aurochs. The sensitivity of perception they reveal. What if, rather than being painted on the surface, these apparitions came through the rock to be seen? The rock opened for them? “When such apparitions came to the first artists,” John Berger writes, “they came almost invisibly and he felt them and traced where they nudged the surface on which they would now stay visible even after they had withdrawn back into the rock.”

Rock appears lifeless, but these first artists knew that it is not. Imagine the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet themselves transformed, turned inside out, so that all that dark drama is now visible on their skin, and that skin were clay. Imagine that moment when stone came to life. A wondrous metamorphosis from whose hard cocoon a world emerges: the world of Beth Cavener.

It’s not through stone but rather through flesh itself her creatures have come. They come to her, almost invisibly again, and she finds them and forms with her hands where they nudge against her skin, forms with her hands what will now exist beyond her even after they have withdrawn back deep beneath her skin. How far through her mind each creature has to travel is impossible to say, but in impressing themselves they impress also the stories of their passage out to the clay, stories told in expressions and gestures, the field around the clay. Visual fables with special powers of narration. Epic stories without words, violent and eloquent in their silence.

The sculptures as if the creatures have formed themselves, as if the artist is their medium rather than their translator. The distinction is crucial. The creatures speak only because the sculptor has found a way to shed her own voice. She does not give herself up in advance, she does not and cannot empty herself by a conscious act of will, it is the process of shaping that frees her and allows these creatures, if only for a moment, to