Clare Stephenson’s sculptures are barely sculptures at all; their physical presence is a humorously humble illusion. Made from silkscreen on wooden panels, her prop-like cutouts stand in as playful representations of three-dimensional form: flat-packed, cartoonish, and slapstick. This game of perception – of subverting material with image and vice versa – is redoubled in her work’s development process, whereby each sculpture-image is assembled from photographs of other sculptures that have in turn been cropped and photocopied from books. La Belle Toute Savante (Our Lady of the Conscious Optics) presents a camp model of sophistication. Hiding her face behind a coiffure pilfered from an engraving and wearing a schematic, raster-printed dress, she balances precariously en pointe, self-consciously dressed up in the costume of art history.
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