Deep, Dark, Desperate / Eat Your Saints is a multi-sensory installation and performance exploring individual and collective acts of violence through a feminist lens. Engaging with the morally ambiguous, voyeuristic pleasures of horror films, acts of brutality from canons of art and anatomy, and the martyrdom of saints, the exhibition will use cast forms from the artists’ own bodies, offering them up as sacrificial vessels.

Realised in wax and chocolate, these vessels are intended to be destroyed and consumed – by both the artists and audience – slipping between liquid/solid in a transformative process evoking magic, miracles, and entropy. As a historically bodily material, wax recorded the physical presence of the dead or diseased. Chocolate is equally fleshy, but an object of desire, and a reminder of the Dangerous Appetites of Women.

Through abject, simulated acts of immolation and cannibalism, the artists will confront the extreme cultural unease surrounding female bodies and identities. This exhibition was first shown at Kings ARI, and will be shown at FELTspace in later 2018.

My contribution to this exhibition, titled ‘Deep, Dark, Desperate’, was a series of beeswax candles cast from 3D scans of my own body. Drawing on ideas of ritual, exchange, and the idea that desires come at a cost, viewers were instructed to light one candle in exchange for one prayer, wish or curse, thus accepting my offer that my effigies act as the necessary sacrificial vessel required to bring their desires into fruition.

Photos by Matto Lucas.