Jacqueline Stieger

Jacqueline A. N. Stieger (born 1936) is a British artist and sculptor who primarily works in cast metal, creating jewellery and medals as well as larger sculptures.

She has executed architectural commissions for churches and chapels in the UK, France and Switzerland (some jointly with her husband, Alfred Gruber, who died in 1972).

[6] The family were at first based in Switzerland, where much of their output was for church interiors, including Rudolfstetten and Sarnen,[1][2] with Stieger's main contributions being windows.

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.

[4][7] During the 1980s, she received several commissions for large-scale works,[7] and had two solo exhibitions at the Copernican Connection Gallery in Beverley (1985, 1988), showing many large bronzes as well as jewellery and medals.

[4][8] More recently, Stieger participated in an exhibition of jewellery at Goole Museum in 2021, as part of which she mentored two younger local jewellers in her techniques.

[13] In an interview, she describes The Orb as "a huge, eye-level punctuation mark which takes your eye away from its surroundings", adding that the intention is that viewers can both see into the globe and look through it.

Her Grow Food medal (1974), which won the Fondation pour le Développement de l'Art Médaille en France's Prix renouveau de la médaille, has an irregular outline containing shapes based on pea pods;[1] The Telegraph's art critic Terence Mullaly describes it as a "virile abstract design suggestive of organic growth".

Stieger 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".

[1][4] Her work Dr Donald MacKay, honouring the tropical health specialist, places a conventional medal inside a larger piece with a globe that splits open.

[1] 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.

[28] In 1976–77, she designed and made the chain of office for the chair of Humberside County Council, setting beach flint pebbles in gold.