This paper, based on an installation and performance work of art ‘Mashed Potato’ Hive Projects and residency T1+2 Artspace January 2010.The work examines how food has evolved to have a very different social function to its origins.At its most progressive and liberating it is considered an art form.
The problem is humans are conditioned to control, just as we control and manipulate our social environment to suit us, so we manipulate our planets resources.Where once food was part of our spiritual culture it is now a commercial enterprise, a drug that be used to harm, kill or cure, a political campaign as in genetic modification, and recently it has created a new breed of feminists.
The scale jockey, the bulimic revolutionist, the medically insane anorexics – this message of antagonistism is played out on the front covers of glossy celebrity magazines as near emaciated woman with bleached teeth glare at us. There is no sense that these women represent womankind. Woman used to represent fecundity, Venus effigies such as the 35,000 year ago German Venus of Hohle Fels were created as talisman ritually buried into ‘mother earth’ to placate and beg for bountifulness. Some very old practises are still with us today such as feeding of young girls to fatten them for marriage calledLeblouh, yet in the west we don’t have to force feed as there is an epidemic of obesity. There appears to be no end in sight to our tampering, where will we end up?
“Mashed Potato” has been accepted for presentation at the 2010 Double Dialogues Conference, hosted by the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto from August 19 to August 21, 2010.
The work evolves from the action of preparation of food into an action that creates a sculptural material – the action of transforming a substance that can be manipulated physically - The end sculptures are based on 3 actions 1. Gorging, 2. Retching, 3. Starving or blocking of the food matter - all are factors that surround food polemically today - the journey from sublime nature to controlled society. The critical comment is made by a wall sculpture rather than a literal addition called ‘Digest’ where the use of fire has replaced gastric juices in dissolving the matter - in this case wood - the other two properties used are mercury sulphide that is rubbed into the wood and gold powder - expressing the alchemistic process of transformation.
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