Gabriella Hudson
For this piece, I chose to use collage as my creative methodology to explore the relationship between food and womanhood. Using cardboard to create the panels of a corset, I cut out images and text from The Week (a weekly news magazine subscription in my house), Which? best buys magazine, and some free supermarket magazines that I picked up while doing my food shop. The idea for my project came from thinking about the presentation of women and food, the way women interact with food, the stereotypes that exist around this, and the expectations that women so often come to embody. The major theme that I kept coming back to was one of restriction. A misogynistic, outdated trope pervades that women belong in the kitchen, while their activities ought to be restricted to the tasks of cooking, providing food for their family and caring for their children. This form of restriction operates in tandem with the pressure that women feel to conform to a certain ideal body type, controlling their intake through diets and restrictive eating. I wanted to use the structure of the corset to critique this relationship in a very visual, physical way. Each panel of the corset has been collaged individually with a slightly different take on the restricted relationship between women and food: the tension between temptation and denial; the roles of provider and depriver; the desirable female figure; and desirable behaviours. I wanted the corset to be beautiful because on the outside that is the purpose of this restriction, but it painfully squeezes the woman’s body to fit its mould.
Click Below to Return to the Curation Front Page:
