"This notion of desire in my work evolves from my interest in feminism, and the ways in which mainstream contemporary feminist resistance is often domesticated by capitalist pleasure and the Lacanian understanding of ‘jouissance’, as a traumatic force of agency that carries more pain than enjoyment or pleasure.
Within mainstream contemporary culture and advertising, feminism is often reduced to a philosophy of individual fulfilment by means of consumption rather than collective action and liberation, where there is a danger that feminism is being recuperated to become so de-politicised that it only pertains to the ability to consume what you desire, or influenced to desire, and buy merchandise branded with ironic empty “girl power” slogan-ism. There is a notion that our liberation can be bought, where co-operations appropriate, neutralise, gift wrap, and stick a bow on our own liberation to then market back to us. I portray this in my work by using food as a symbol for excess, indulgence and feminised consumerist consumption where we consume highly elaborate images vicariously, in an imagined state of deliciousness, as an unrealizable desire and almost as fetish. This commercial presence of food infers a certain position of exceptional privilege: having fulfilled its purpose as a requirement for biological survival, the question of food supply becomes a matter of recreation.
In order for my work to function as a critique of this phenomenon I adopt it’s commercial visual language and then attempt to subvert it and momentarily defer consumer gratification by utilising Julia Kristeva’s state of abjection as an apparatus to intervene within consumption practises, aiming to evoke a sense of repulsion in the viewer and further, a curdling of desire and disgust. The state of abjection being, a physical sensation of stomach-churning aversion or repulsion when encountered with something abject, which momentarily fractures our normal lives, shaking us out of a normal understanding of society; our identity, the moral, social and political order. This understanding is reflected in my work through the imagery of food being contaminated, leaking, oozing and transgressing borders. As well as the understanding that often what is regarded as dirt is, 'matter out of place'."