Pork
The carving of a lump of fat
In case I was in any doubt over how bent out of shape I’ve been this year, I agreed to contribute work to an exhibition and have no recollection of doing it.
I’ve seen the email; I was excited and had an idea (apparently), but some time between August and last week, all memory of the arrangement disappeared. I’ve never done this before. I’m a breathing mass of mental lists of things I need to do, but this one leaked out of my ears.
I did wind up in A&E after breaking my fall onto the pavement with my own face, and while I was briefly slowed down, I don’t think the knock was to blame. But I did wonder. It’s just so out of character.
Several emails later, I realised that I did in fact owe a gallery some work yesterday, and the deadline had already been extended to accommodate me.
I experienced three strong emotions and the physical urge to vomit, but Louise Fitzjohn from Liminal Gallery is an angel among mortals, and instead of spitting in my career’s face (which would have been acceptable), she empathised and was open to my suggestion to pull an oddity out of the studio that never fit in anywhere else:
Pork
A gormless, plum-sized face carved out of pink opal during the tentative lifting of the first lockdown in 2020.
I travelled to Charlotte De Syllas’s studio for a week-long stone carving course to get to grips with how intaglios enter the world and took on a sculptural project at the same time.
Given free reign to make our choice of rock from a table laden with them, I was immediately drawn to the opaque pink opal and upon turning it over, marvelled at how the Oil of Olay hue gave way to gritty browns and flaked white around its outer edges, looking like the salty burnt grit caught in congealed fat scraped out of a roasting pan.
It was pork and grease and smooth and hard all at once: impossibly all of those things and still, a rough lump of stone. As I sliced it down to size, keeping a dark-meat edge at the base, it really did look like a cube of pork belly.
A gurning fat man has never been my subject of choice, but the decision was taken out of my hands. I will always choose an organic curve over a straight edge as well. This just had to be the direction to go in.
As I explained it to Louise: it was 2020 and there were a lot of back-footed pink-faced men on the news. Of its ilk, a painting that never saw the light of day, Fat White Fucks was a mean-spirited product of the same time. Maybe it was the stone, maybe it was 2020- nevertheless, it’s Pork and it will be on show at Liminal Gallery from Nov 15 - Jan 17.
Here’s the process:
Beautiful and gross in equal measure.