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Dipping Sauce
MAISIE COUSINS
10 Nov – 2 Dec 2018
Tue-Sun 12-6pm
As the opening show for Elephant West, Maisie Cousins presents Dipping Sauce, consisting of a new series of large scale photographic works, in print and on lightboxes, and animations on screens. Maisie creates an immersive experience for the audience, surrounding them with hyper-saturated macro images of food and the aftermath of gluttony.
As well as celebrating the joy of eating, Maisie is interested in the strong connection between food and memory. Bringing in nostalgic references from the artist’s own culinary history, Dipping Sauce takes us on a romp through sumptuous landscapes of giant vegetables and oversized dumplings, lakes of soy sauce and oceans of gelatinous goop. Reminiscent of the end of a family meal, or a decadent evening spent feasting with friends, the images trigger a kaleidoscope of memories and references as we walk amongst them. Echoing the strangeness of a dream, Maisie’s world is familiar yet disturbing: plastic mermaids recline on a sweet-and-sour shoreline; a junkshop swan glides on a sauce puddle in a field of rice; tiny babies crawl amongst a pile of sticky noodles.
Maisie says, of developing the work for the show, “I am thinking of my own freedom, my own luxurious travelling and food consumption. I am fascinated by the restrictions of food outside of cosmopolitan areas and the extreme opposite – mass choice in cities. What I will be exploring with photography and video is waste, over indulgence, decay and the universal language of food imagery. I will be pulling inspiration from around the West London area, where I also grew up; the huge amount of different foods, cultures and demographics. I aim to depict a beauty but also question the large amount of freedom of choice we have with food here.”
As with all of Maisie’s work, Dipping Sauce provokes a mixture of delight and disgust, attraction and repulsion, exploring the overlap between beauty and the abject.
Maisie Cousins (b. 1992, London), grew up in west London. She graduated from Brighton University in 2014 with a BA in Fine Art Photography, and has since exhibited in group shows in Milan, LA, Austin and New York, and produced her first solo show at TJ Boulting in 2017.
