Research

Reflections on Polyculture

On Wednesday 10 August I also went along to Jonathan Trayte’s Polyculture exhibition at The Tetley in Leeds, this exhibition was a pleasant surprise and consisted of garish and visceral sculptures inspired by food and the horrors of the food industry. The initial room of the exhibition immediately hit you with this horror, presenting here a mammoth cucumber sculpture covered with with a thick outer layer like it had been polyfillered in multiple layers before painted in an insipid green. Next to this stood a giant inflatable column, the material of which looked slight like sweet potato but misshapen and discoloured. Littered in between were many concrete sculptures of squash, void of colour and appearing as if decomposing. All of these provided an excellent start to the remainder of the exhibition housed in various adjoining rooms off this. Within these you got the sense more of the inspiration of the horrors of the food industry, where food items are made to look the most pleasing to the eye and seemingly engineered to be pretty over actually tasting nice. One of the rooms I found particularly interesting included what looked like sausages hanging from a round frame, but instead of what we would normally expect these appeared candy pink and encased in a translucent pink latex casting and elongated in form. The effect of these ‘sausages’ was similar to that which I am hoping to achieve with the tentacle output of my project, to appear beautiful yet horrific and give the viewer a supremely visceral and fleshy encounter with the ‘body’.

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