Family Group is a masterpiece of Tasseor’s mid-career style. Carved in an incredibly hard, heavy stone that feels like a piece of metal ore, it must have presented Tasseor with a huge technical challenge. The artist, whose love of the shapes and properties of natural stone is well known, usually let intuition be her guide in these things. For Tasseor, part of the process of carving each sculpture was deciding what to work and what to simply leave alone. In many of her sculptures the stone is fully worked and finished; in others, some of the stone’s shape and surfaces is left pretty much alone; in a few, the raw stone becomes a major part of the composition. Family Group is one of the great exemplars of the latter category. To our eyes, it is one of most evocative and poetic of Tasseor’s works from any period of her career. It is reminiscent of two of her masterpieces from c. 1975: Faces Emerging from Stone and Head Cluster, both illustrated in Norman Zepp’s Pure Vision catalogue (39, 40).

References: See the section on Lucy Tasseor in Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), pp. 86-95; for the works closest to this one see Faces Emerging from Stone (cat. 39), and Head Cluster (cat. 40). See also Feheley Fine Arts, Lucy Tasseor: I Turn to Stone (Toronto: Feheley Fine Arts, 2015), solo exhibition catalogue with an essay by Ingo Hessel.