Deutscher and Hackett

The following excerpt is quoted from Howard Taylor: Phenomena, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003, p. 41 

'Taylor's response to the description of volumes, in both the paintings and sculpture, consists of exposing them as intelligible structures. An early example is the stick-insect subject, first developed in Creature 1955. The conoidal form of the subject, comprising both a cone and a suggested spiral movement, establishes its palpability through the implied spatial extension of a basic tripod structure. Creature can be considered as the initial emergence of what Taylor develops in later works as 'forest figures'. 

The first use of the 'stick insect' as a subject for a sculpture occurs with Stick Insect 1958. This work retains many of the characteristics introduced in Creature, despite the cone shape being replaced by a central cylinder with projections. The stick-insect sculptures are basically volumetric forms, the volume being maintained in each case through schematic approximations. The paintings and sculptures from this period informed by a particularly British attitude to the surrealist object, with its penchant for a found object extracted from the landscape.'