The Debate, Frieze Sculpture 2023, takes place from 20 September - 29 October 2023 in The Regent’s Park's English Gardens, curated by Fatoş Üstek, presented by Sid Motion Gallery and Pi Artworks
The Debate is a ceramic installation comprised of two near life-size adult figures and half of an oversized boiled egg. Typical of the artist’s practice, the figures combine abstract and figurative elements, which, following the glazing process, form anthropomorphic birds reminiscent of ducks. Depending on the direction of approach of the viewer, the figures seem to be looking either at a complete egg with the potential for hatching, or one half of a bisected boiled egg.
The artist’s interest lies in the duck and the egg being traditional ceramic forms. Ducks being one of the avian world’s greatest migrants has given them long-held significance in the creative realm, and since the advent of pottery, they have been sculpted in clay. Likewise, the egg has enjoyed widespread ceramic popularity, often used as a trompe l’oeil. More curiously, the terracotta egg was used as a Talmudic measurement in the ancient world. Here, the egg cannot be intentionally read as a singular symbolic gesture, rather it is positioned as a challenge to our food-chain supply and to reference the quintessential life debate: whether we perceive our experience of living as being half-full or half-empty.
Stevenson nods to the playful, uncanny, sculptures of pop art, which impacted both outdoor artwork and inventively referenced female reproductivity. Here, the egg can be read as a body clock, while the two figures whose elongated torsos rise from striped canopic-shaped jars ultimately evade gender categorization. The Debate is the artist’s largest ceramic work to-date, and within the realm of the public park, it seeks to inspire a multitude of questions, everything from ducks, eggs and reproduction, to picnics and cannibalism. There is something both charming and monstrous about a bird and half a boiled egg sharing space, and, as the title implies, debates in today’s socio-political climate are not singular, but complex and multifaceted.
Throughout history, eggs have appeared in countless artworks, serving as a universal symbol of life, growth, and transformation representing various concepts such as fertility, birth, creation, and resurrection. In many mythologies, the egg is associated with the world's birth and fertility. In ancient Egypt, for example, the Milky Way emerged from the waters as a hill of rubbish, and the god Reborn from an egg laid on this mound by a celestial bird. The egg also can represent the renewal of the cycle of nature in the context of the ceramic installation commissioned for Frieze Sculpture Park titled “The Debate” by Holly Stevenson, an oversized half-boiled egg placed near adult life-size figures. Typical of the artist’s practice, the figures are composed of abstract and figurative elements, and here they meld to form anthropomorphic birds that, on account of the glazing, recall ducks.
In response to “The Debate”, hosted by Pi Artworks and Sid Motion Gallery, in collaboration with artist Holly Stevenson we invite you to an egg act by offering a symbolic vegan egg as a gesture. While you listen to the artist and curator talk further about the work, the references and the story behind it, you will be encouraged to touch, smell and taste the vegan egg that resembles a real egg in form and texture. You’ll be invited to answer the famous riddle, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Each Egg Act will include 88 vegan eggs to hand out with an artist edition picnic bag, so please make sure to RSVP if you wish to take one.