Breakfast

Resin, polymer clay and ceramic

More literal and explicit in meaning than my past work, the pieces I’ve been working on in 2019 explore some incredibly dark themes; specifically objectification and sexualisation. Further building on my concept of Confectionery Portraiture, I created a series of sculptures depicting black body parts in the form of food. Viewers are invited to taste the artwork in an act that is cannibalistic in nature. In the installation, which I have entitled ‘I Eat Black Girls For Breakfast,’ the black female body is transformed into something of a spectacle, and those who view the installation are free to pick and choose which elements of blackness (physical and cultural) to consume. One can simply walk over and tuck into a chocolatey breast, or pluck a milky eyelid directly from the bowl and devour it.

I have taken a handful of what are seemingly the most popular, characteristically black, body parts [i.e. buttocks, lips, noses] and presented them in an edible format. I have worked incredibly hard to make them appear delicious and desirable, presenting them at a banquet table as the quintessential image of civilised-ness in a sort of dark reimagining of the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland. Of course, the act of consuming another human being is far from civilised. I have attempted to harness the grotesqueness of this act as a means of evoking the disgust and indignation experienced by many black when witnessing the appropriation of culture as carried out individuals of other backgrounds. This is a means of turning the tables if you will, revealing the grotesque side of cultural appropriation that many deny exists.