Eat Soup or Die Trying

Eat Soup or Die Trying, consists of a new body of paintings reflecting on the wellness industry in the early twentieth century; particularly the experimental fad diets and treatment centres that gained popularity in this era. This show explores the perceived link between fasting and cleansing, tracing through a long Catholic tradition of restricted eating and revisiting these worlds to consider how moralising consumption haunts contemporary conversations around food. Soup takes centre stage in this series, inspired by the liquified blends of fruits and vegetables integral to these turn of the century programmes. Colanders, sieves, and cheese cloths take figurative form; tomatoes are pulped and strained in bodily mimesis. Free-flowing fluids are stiffly sculpted as foods are forced into strict, consistent striations. The human form is absent in consideration of the psychological causes for disordered eating, self-violence put forward as a grounding distraction from an external in flux.