Still Life with Two Jugs and an Egg Cup

Inkjet print on MDF

Dimensions: 101 cm x 153 cm

 

 

In this large, digitally generated print, the artist has created a simple domestic tableau consisting of two jugs and an eggcup. Everything, the table, the three objects, and the wall in the background have been covered in luxurious cream wallpaper with a stylised Victorian floral motif.

 

Conjuring up references to femininity, domestic interiors, and upper-middle class taste and values, including aspirations of grandeur, this patterned surface becomes a common denominator, merging the figures with the ground, and vice versa. Through this forced and uncanny uniformity, familiar objects are defamiliarised, made strange, and charged with unexpected meanings: we are invited to read the clichéd, ‘jokey’ allusions to the female reproductive body - the two jugs and the eggcup - in light of their oppressive confinement and tyrannical homogeneity.

 

Still, it is more complex. It is double-edged: the wallpaper wraps and conceals, yet reveals underlying forms; it is delicate and stylish, yet overpowering and stifling, infecting everything in the room. In the end, the ‘joke’ (on the female reproductive body) registers as simply too knowing, stifled, and awkward, revealing, if nothing else, merely an underlying tedium and aggression.