Welded steel, 58 x 23 x 27, 1996.
The title is Big Daddy’s word in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). He is dying of cancer, and his family has told him he is well. He recognizes the deceit as a condition of the whole household, and says it has an odor stronger than any other in the room. Williams gives the word to the one character who is being lied to.
The sculpture is a standing, hooded figure. A cowl-like mass at the top billows forward and leans out beyond the block it sits on, off the vertical of the lower body. Where a face would be, a vertical band runs down the front, fastened along its length by two rows of round studs. It reads as a seam pinned shut or a placket buttoned to the throat. The hood has no opening. The front it presents is closed, regular and fixed, while the mass behind and above it tilts and swells without that regularity.
A flat plate juts out to the left at mid-height, an arm or shoulder held away from the body at a slant. At the base, a dark oval hollow is cut into the side of the heavy block. It is the one visible opening in the piece, and it sits at the bottom, away from the fastened front. The patinated surface is dark and glossy, and it throws back the light of the room around it. A figure that gives so little away on its surface, and keeps its only visible cavity down low and to the side, is well suited to a title about concealment.
