Introduction: Breathing Life into Metal

Few artists can make steel look tender. Kendra Haste, however, does not merely twist galvanized wire—she coaxes from it the contours of breath, muscle, and instinct. Her creatures do not stand still. They tense. They wait. They watch.

In Big Bad Wolf, her first museum solo exhibition, now open at the Iron Art Casting Museum in Büdelsdorf, Haste delivers a primal and provocative meditation on conservation and rewilding. These aren’t fables; they’re flesh and filament, wound tight with the tension of centuries.

The Beast Within the Wire

A lone white-tailed eagle, wings arrested mid-sweep. A stag poised between threat and majesty. Wolves whose gnarled grace recalls stories told around the campfire—of menace, of myth, of return.

Each sculpture is native to Northern Germany. Each carries its own ecological weight: the endangered, the invasive, the resurrected. And each, built entirely from galvanized wire, plays at that exquisite edge between brutality and beauty.

Haste avoids sentimentality like a hunter’s snare.

I try to capture the emotional essence without slipping into anthropomorphism.

– She says—and it’s true.

There is no Disney in her deer, no softening in her snarling boars. They are animals, yes. But more pressingly, they are us. Or rather, what we’ve lost of ourselves.

Towering Legacy and Historical Echoes

This is not Haste’s first dance with history. Her permanent installation at the Tower of London—a bestiary of ghostly lions, elephants, and bears—recalls the city’s Royal Menagerie, which once housed exotic animals gifted to monarchs between the 13th and 19th centuries. Her elephant, for instance, nods to a French royal gift from 1255; her polar bear, to one possibly floated over from Norway.

Originally intended as a ten-year exhibition, the Tower works now stand permanent. That longevity feels earned—her creatures have burrowed into the stone and psyche of the place.

Big Bad Questions

With Big Bad Wolf, Haste pushes deeper. This is no mere bestiary. It’s a question in sculpture form: What would it mean to let nature come back?

Rewilding—a hot-button term as slippery as the creatures it describes—is her thematic backbone here. Wolves once roamed this region. Now they return. But do we welcome them or wall them off again?

Her wire does not answer. It vibrates with the ambivalence. “Wire, like cast iron,” Haste says, “holds a tension between strength and fragility.” That tension courses through every sinew she wraps. It is the aesthetic and the ethic of this show.