In Mother Plays Games, Stephanie Temma Hier stages a tightly composed scene where touch, female sensuality, and playful surrealism intersect with the grotesque. A photorealistic oil painting of a woman scratching her back with a hand-shaped back scratcher is set inside a glazed ceramic sardine tin, peeled open to reveal rows of sculpted fish. The composition draws on a 1960s advertisement that promised to “Quell the maddening itch!”—a slogan Hier invokes with a wink, nodding to the absurd theatrics of consumer desire and bodily care.
At its core, the work is about sensation—the strange intimacy of a self-administered scratch, the artificiality of a tool designed to mimic the human hand, and the visceral stillness of the ceramic sardines. The fish, a recurring motif in Hier’s practice, evoke containment, decay, and domestic consumption, while the hand-shaped scratcher becomes a stand-in for both human touch and the artist’s own tools—brushes, loops, and implements of transformation.
Built entirely by hand, Hier’s ceramic structures both frame and inform her paintings. Mother Plays Games embodies her broader practice, where wit, eroticism, and material play converge. It’s a visual riddle that celebrates the body’s strangeness, embracing contradiction with humor and sensitivity.