Pluck, Studio, 2022

Pluck #1 and #2

Studio

Cold finish porcelain with engraving, 17cm x 6cm x 13cm

Pink in plastic is a term given to processed packaged cold cuts. Cryovacing, along with other preserving techniques, allows us to preserve volatile food items for extraordinary amounts of time, giving us security in our food choices. This sculpture started as packaged Frankfurt sausages, bunched and commercially cryovaced into a wormy mass. Through a mould-making process a porcelain cast is created. The copy retains the external form of the bundled sausages, but in stripping away the artificial shiny red sausage casing the form connects more closely to intestines, a fist, a mass of earthworms.

A soft pink paint is washed quickly onto the porous surface after which the work is laboriously etched directly into the chalky surface. The engravings echo the forms organic and wormy nature, wending up the sides, and spreading around the edges like mycelium. The curvy line drawing is the closest I can get to rendering the delicate, almost formless velvet villi of the gut that I have studied in colonoscopy footage. This villi represents the threshold between us and the in/edible food we welcome into our body.

- Artist statement