Jacqueline Stieger

Jacqueline Stieger (born 1936) is a British sculptor who primarily works in cast metal. Her works include sculptures, both architectural commissions and standalone pieces, as well as jewellery and art medals. She has executed commissions for churches and chapels in the UK, France and Switzerland, some jointly with her husband, Alfred Gruber, who died in 1972.

Biography

Stieger was born in 1936 in Wimbledon, London, where her Swiss parents, John and Trudy Stieger, were attending university. The family soon moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, where her father worked as an aeronautical engineer. Jacqueline Stieger was educated at the Bedales boarding school, near Petersfield, Hampshire, and later the Quaker school, The Mount School, York. She studied art at Edinburgh College of Art (1954–59), where her tutors included William Gillies, John Maxwell, William MacTaggart and James Cumming. Despite the conventional trend to the teaching at Edinburgh, she became interested in abstract art, including its application to textiles. Her first sculpture was Descent of the Cross (c. 1959), a Biblically inspired work in carved pine.

She remained in Edinburgh until 1962, when she visited Switzerland and met Alfred Gruber, an Austrian-born sculptor with a workshop in Laufen, near Basel. Gruber had started to cast and work metal, and taught Steiger some of the basic techniques. The two began a fruitful collaboration, with Stieger splitting her time between Switzerland and her studio in Beverley, Yorkshire. At her first solo exhibition in Hull the following year, her sculpture drew praise from Herbert Read, who writes "She creates forms of great complexity, which... I think are dynamic forms... creating a pattern of unity and significance." In 1965, she held a solo exhibition at Basel's Galerie Riehentor.

In 1966, she and Gruber married. The couple were at first based in Switzerland, where much of their output was for church interiors, including Rudolfstetten and Sarnen. In 1969 they established a joint workshop and foundry in the Yorkshire village of Welton. In addition to sculptures, in Welton the couple began to create jewellery together, which they termed "microsculpture"; the graphic artist William MacKay describes it as "surely the world's most distinctive and differentiated jewellery". Pieces were purchased for Goldsmiths' Hall in London.

Gruber died of lung cancer early in 1972. Stieger kept working at Welton, participating in a joint exhibition in Leeds shortly after her husband's death, and fulfilling a major commission for Gillespie, Kidd & Coia that he had won to furnish the interior of St Margaret's Roman Catholic Church in Clydebank, Glasgow. She continued to make jewellery, and the following year, branched into creating art medals. She additionally taught art at the University of Hull's School of Architecture (1976–88).

Lectern steps, St Giles' Cathedral (1991)

The Scots Kirk, Paris

Works

Stieger's works include sculptures, both architectural commissions and standalone pieces, as well as jewellery and medals, with examples in the permanent collections of the British Museum, Leeds Art Gallery, Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and the Beverley Art Gallery. In later works, she uses the lost-wax technique to make large and small metalworks, often using bronze, silver or gold. Her large-scale works include:

• Church Ennetbaden, Zürich, Switzerland: four windows (1967)
• St Margaret's Roman Catholic Church, Clydebank, Glasgow: interior furnishings and statue of Madonna in glass/lead (1972–73); the church is now listed at grade B
• St Columbkille's Church, Rutherglen, Glasgow: shrine to St Ogilvie (1977); the church is now listed at grade A
• Robinson College chapel, Cambridge: bronze-work decoration to the west and south doors, internal bronze screen and gate (1980); the chapel is now listed at grade II*
• Eastgate, Beverley: bronze sculpture (1989)
• St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh: bronze/stone moveable lectern steps (1991)
• Hunmanby, North Yorkshire: fountain
• The Scots Kirk, Paris: screen
• St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham: bronze font
• Chingford church, east London: bronze candle votive, based on cow parsley

Medals and small sculptures

Her earliest medals, News and Fishes, were designed and made for the Royal Mint's "Medals Today" exhibition at Goldsmiths' Hall in 1973; both address the theme of threats to the environment, with Fishes drawing from the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Her Grow Food medal (1974) won the Fondation pour le Développement de l'Art Médaille en France's Prix renouveau de la médaille; it contains shapes based on pea pods and has an irregular outline. Some of her later medals continue to address the theme of food shortage, including Food Furrows (1982), the Hunger Medal (1994) and Water Medal (2009). She has also created medals on the themes of urban development, road building and traffic, including Places for People (c. 1975), influenced by the aerial and prospect architectural views in Bernard Rudofsky's book Architecture Without Architects, as well as Traffic Protest (1974) and Destruction of the Town (1992), inspired by Philip Larkin's poem, "Going, going".

Some of her medals take unusual forms. Her McKechnie Lecture Medal (1983) has a book-like form with a hinge, which Terence Mullaly considers to give a "new perspective" on the form of medals. Her successful T. E. Lawrence Centenary Medal (1988) is another example of the book presentation. Her work Dr Donald MacKay, honouring the tropical health specialist, places a conventional medal inside a larger piece with a globe that splits open. In 2009, she made the medal Global Warming for Goldsmiths' Hall, which is in silver with an interior visible through a hole.

Hinges are also a feature of some of Stieger's sculptures including Spider House in bronze, lead and stone (late 1960s), which allows the viewer to interact with the sculpture. In the 1970s she created book-like bronzes with moveable leaves. Several of her sculptures depict underlying aspects of natural objects, including the bronze Homage to Hoskins (1975) – inspired by W. G. Hoskins' book, The Making of the English Landscape – which Malcolm Cook describes as "turning back layers of earth to reveal the past". Hoskins Sketch: an Aerial View (2016), with several sections of silver set with semi-precious stones and connected by hinges, continues her exploration of this idea.

She also created the William Kent Tercentenary Medal (1985) and the BBC Africa Sports Star of the Year Medal (1992). Her design for a medal to commemorate the Millennium Dome won a UK-wide competition in 1999.