Thought about carving potatoes and vegetables into different disciples but decided I didn't really like that idea and there was no way I could carve them well enough to look like real people. So I turned to a more
cartoony approach but didn't think just sticking googly eyes on a couple of carrots would be that effective...
Looked again at 'The Last Snack' and how the biscuits hadn't been changed themselves just decorated to give them each a kind of personality-a little decoration could do so much. This, I thought, connected to food packaging and advertising, where food is dressed up in all sorts of ways so that we don't know what is actually in it anymore. Food is put in certain contexts in adverts so that certain foods become only suitable for men or are covered in brightly coloured foil and deemed only suitable for kids. Food is disguised so that we don't have to think about what it really is-the dead carcass of an animal or even basically some mould.
The way we present a food can totally change peoples view of it. I thought a good example of this was meat, and how different people represent meat as a something living whose life has been taken away,a symbol of cruelty, wheras others see it as something totally removed from the living animal, a simple form of
sustenance, a fact of life.
Personally, I have no qualms about eating meat but don't like to be reminded that what I am eating was a living thing-or rather, is a dead body. Not because I feel sympathetic towards the animal, but because it disgusts me to think about eating a dead thing. I am repulsed by raw meat but will gladly eat a stake or roast chicken. Is this because once cooked it looks like the meat I see in pictures in adverts and on packaging? How much do the images on packaging or the colours on the packaging itself influence how I taste certain foods or which foods I am willing to eat? Why does food need to be so disguised? Why does what an animal looks like affect my decision whether to eat it or not so much?
In order to discourage people from eating meat, meat is often represented by the
discouragers as
originating in some young,harmless furry
creature with big eyes whom we have slayed without mercy. But why should eating a puppy be any different from eating a cow?
In these ways the packaging and representation of food plays a huge part in our perception of it.
I thought about trying to
incorporate this theme into my last supper idea but thought this would be too much and decided to abandon the last supper idea in favour of this food packaging one, which I thought was simpler but more
evocative. I decided that the best way to illustrate this idea would be to actually use food in the outcome, which would be 3D. I wanted to decorate food, to turn it into something different from how it is usually presented and exaggerate the idea of food being disguised.
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'The Last Snack'
'The Last Supper' Leonardo da Vinci.
