Tough to Swallow - Limited Edition of 8 Print

Inherently ambiguous in its manifestation, food’s interest lies within the domestication of nature and its sense of otherness, a source of disruption to the body’s equilibrium. This work is an exploration into the symbolic and sensuous nature of the consumed. The images employ tensions embedded within dichotomies that have underpinned culture throughout history, while using surrealism to subvert expectations and generate new perspectives. Referencing the still life alongside the physical and metaphysical parts of the human body, the work investigates the carnality and corporeality in our eating habits, and the relationship between nature and culture, concentrating on culture’s triumph over nature through culinary intervention and contemporary notions of propriety. Drawing on the viewer’s visceral response to food, the work references commercial food photography tropes traditionally used to elicit feelings of hunger and desire, and aims to destabilise this by compounding these feelings with those of mortality, aversion and excess.