Food & Drink

“Like many people in lockdown, I started to grow vegetables and fruits as a way to ease my anxiety around decreasing food supplies and to enjoy a simple, physical activity away from screens. These works refer to growers and gardener’s tactile pleasure in their contact with soil and plants, and their pride in harvesting the fruit of their labour, but also to markets’ produce as being freshly picked, evoking a sense of abundance, local and seasonal deliciousness.

The Confined Harvest is an ongoing autobiographical work made of cyclical ‘performances’ captured with a flatbed scanner. Each photograph records my harvesting of a vegetable I planted during lockdown.

Referring to the Dig for Victory WW2 campaign, these works not only allude to issues of survival in a global crisis but also to the invigorating and tactile aspect of growing food as an antidote to digital overload.I see these as tentative self-portraits; my hand holding the fruits of its labour with unequivocal tactile pleasure and a palpable sense of pride – or is it a sense of victory over feelings of claustrophobia, as the plant overflows the tight frame of the flatbed scanner?”