RSA Journal Editor Leah Clarkson profiles artist Beth Cavener and her latest exhibition, Trust, exploring how Cavener’s human-like animal sculptures evoke vulnerability and suspicion, forcing viewers to reflect on their own hidden instincts. At its heart is Shards, a shattered and painstakingly rebuilt life-size sculpture of a lion, symbolising both the fragility and resilience of trust. Cavener asks: Can we mend what’s broken – and create something even stronger?
Six minutes
The artist Beth Cavener’s clay animals are caught in the throes of emotions – fear, suspicion, disdain, despair – that humans would often rather avoid. Her staggering new exhibition, Trust forces us to confront these instincts in ourselves and asks if we have the empathy needed to rebuild what’s been lost.
It was the height of the pandemic, and Beth Cavener was locked in a tiny studio apartment with her six-year-old son. Amid the fear and isolation, with vaccines still on the distant horizon and watching riots and insurrection unfold across the United States, her need to protect (especially as a single parent) overrode rationality.
Cavener was trying, she says, to be a pillar of trust for her son at precisely the time she was feeling its “complete breakdown” all around her. She wondered, “How do I teach him what the world can be while watching with despair what the world is becoming?” As the months wore on, she clung to the hope that the world would return to normal post-pandemic but ultimately arrived to find life “on the other side” irrevocably changed.
Cavener is the daughter of a microbiologist and an artist, and these dual influences are evident in her body of work. After graduating from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a degree in fine art – having switched her focus, midway through, from physics and astronomy – she gave herself four years to use art to “find a narrative that would provide a connection between the mundanity of everyday life and the intangible and beautiful truths” about the world that surrounds us.
Though classically trained, Cavener soon became restless with traditional methods of sculpting and casting. To achieve her vision, she experimented with new ways of handling clay, including the construction of intricate armatures that allowed her to create more ambitious pieces in both form and scale. These frameworks helped Cavener to manipulate massive (think, more than 1,000kg) amounts of clay, moulding each figure by hand before cutting it into pieces to be hollowed out, fired, reassembled and finished.
Cavener’s animals are almost unsettlingly appealing. Many exude a vulnerability that makes the viewer want to save them.
“I try to divest myself of judgement when I’m looking at a problem or an interesting set of behaviours,” says Cavener, pointing out that this approach is crucial to creating pieces that can engage viewers from a wide swathe of backgrounds, beliefs and experiences. Indeed, confronted by the six animal figures that make up Trust, it’s clear the viewer is in the presence of an artist with a profound sense of empathy and more than a passing familiarity with the varied contours of solitude. The techniques she has honed over decades, including the construction of the bespoke armatures on which she sculpts, demand the rigour of time and, as Cavener herself admits, prolong the creative process.
Cavener’s animals are almost unsettlingly appealing. Many exude a vulnerability that makes the viewer want to save them; they are caught in traps or trapped in sleep or inviting a caress. But then comes a hitch of recognition: there is something about them too human, too knowing, too suspicious or sexual to be disturbed. They command their own space.
This push and pull is carefully orchestrated by Cavener, whose style has developed precisely to engage the viewer in this way. She humanises her animals anatomically, using “small details, just enough to slide past your consciousness” such as a belly button or a human ribcage. The effect is slightly disorienting for most viewers: something is different, but what?
The [US] election showed how divided everyone is, and everyone is still very much centred on their own needs, which is what happens when there is no trust.
As Cavener commenced her explorations for Trust, “I could not find a real definition of what trust was,” she says. “People would refer to it sideways, like ‘trust in this system’.” What she was certain of, however, was that ‘trust’, whatever it meant, was eroding. The exhibition eventually evolved to comprise six “major characters that embody where trust is decaying or where we are destroying it” and which, as Cavener writes in her exhibition statement, explore “the arduous journey of rebuilding it”.
Knowing it would serve as the “first piece and the centrepiece… the main narrator of this body of work”, Cavener sculpted Shards, a life-size male lion, from almost 1,300kg of clay, working over many months. To the Western gaze, the lion is an icon of power and majesty, and of those institutions (libraries, courts of justice) in which we place our collective trust, and which represent the common belief systems upon which our society relies to function. When the lion was done, she smashed it to pieces with a hammer.
It took her four years to glue it back together.
But why? To make it “even more beautiful because it’s been resurrected and cared for and lovingly preserved”, an approach that echoes a technique admired by Cavener, the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken ceramic or glass pieces are repaired with gold lacquer, creating a new object even more precious than the unbroken original.
Shards, says Cavener, asks, “What if we were to rebuild something from the broken fragments?” What if that something was our collective trust? Having worked to rebuild it, she wonders, could we end up with something even more beautiful?
Cavener isn’t entirely sure if we can get that trust back or not. Given recent events in the US, she says, it “will be tough. The election showed how divided everyone is, and everyone is still very much centred on their own needs, which is what happens when there is no trust.” The latest exhibition is just one way for Cavener to grapple with all that’s been lost in recent years. So much so that she plans to continue this exploration into her next body of work, Trust II.
“How do I get people to say that such an integral part of what it means to be human is that we can trust each other? That apathy is the cause of undoing in the world and empathy is our hope for rebuilding?” Someday, she believes, we can all be “comfortable enough to disagree on things and not have them feel threatening”.
But for now, says Cavener, that’s a future in which we’ll just have to trust.
Leah Clarkson is Editor of the Journal.
Learn more about Beth Cavener, her artistic process and her work.
This feature first appeared in RSA Journal Issue 1 2025.
