Icing
My work focuses on roles of domesticity and consumer culture. My current imagery centers on depictions of food, whether isolated in an image, or placed in a context, such as a grocery store.
To me, food is an intermediary between family history and body image. Certain foods serve as symbols, such as slabs of colorless meat, for the difficulty of family relationships in a context where the forced eating of what was on your plate signified obedience. Other works, such as my icing paintings, celebrate the ridiculous obsession my family has with cake and sweets within a family history of diabetes.
All of these works combine women’s roles of grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, ironing, and sewing, with food. In particular, the icing paintings embody all of these roles; from the sewing of the fabric covers with fancy trims, to the shopping, cooking and cleaning associated with a home-made cake, to the trompe l’oeil representation of piped icing, which takes hours to perfect, merely to be destroyed in one delicious instant. In these paintings, I embrace the imperfections, such as air bubbles and asymmetrical forms in order to create images that are simultaneously dark and playful.
