This work began with a habit of collecting and saving junk mail circulars without any particular plan for them. In 2021, when I began my first summer residency associated with my MFA program, I brought them along and began working with the material with an initial interest in the language of persuasion & coercion as the copywriting in these publications is often quite aggressive and urgent.

As I continued working with this material, I became more interested in how the way we are urged to acquire food is driven not by what we need but by what we want. We don’t need to be told to want food – our bodies and biology tend to do a good job doing that for us. So I became curious about our relationship to acquiring food as something that goes much deeper than our tastes and need for sustenance.

When I started cutting out the food, the empty shapes that emerged intrigued me most. At first pass, the absence the cutouts create could allude to empty calories and the failures of our food system, or the emptiness of our consumption habits – but I was most intrigued by the shapes as a metaphor for desire, and how it’s never really satisfied.