Erin Coates

Food Chains

Food Chains explores digestive biology and the living biome within human bodies to speculate on our consumption of protein in the future. For this new series, I began by sourcing cookery book images from the era that I grew up in, things like Family Circle Microwave Cooking and Women’s Day Perfect Entrees. There is a garish, visceral quality to the food photography during this period as well as a colour separation in the printing process that interests me. Into these food arrangements, I’ve collaged animals from vintage nature encyclopedias and then extended the imagery through graphite drawing to form elements of human biology, focusing on the digestive system. Externalised from our bodies and enmeshed with glistening meats, writhing insects and flourishes of garnish, these organs become new ecosystems, drawing in and processing organic matter.  

The works employ body horror and dark humour to examine our shifting cultural constructs around food and in particular our ever-evolving relationship with the animal world. Anthropogenic impacts on the animal kingdom from feeding the human population ripple far beyond farming practices. Food Chains considers how broader ecosystems are and may become a part of sourcing protein for human consumption in the future. When I began drawing graphite onto these giclee prints, I realised that it creates a ghostly quality on the paper. I have worked with this inherent image quality to create a deliberately ambiguous physiology in the digestive organs. At times, the human merges with an unrecognisable biology and there is a sense of unnatural growth and metamorphosis. Bulging sacs, sinuous tubes and orifices bring a transgressive bodily aesthetic to the interspecies landscape of flesh and it is uncertain where the human begins and ends.
~ Erin Coates