The impetus for this work stretches back to my childhood when my father made chicken soup every other Monday. I loved the soup and never tired of it but I remember at a certain point he began putting several pairs of bright yellow chicken feet into the pot along with the chicken. The sight of multiple pairs of feet was jarring and it left a lasting impression. Soup from that point on was no longer the simple comfort food it had been.

This Christmas while I was washing a turkey to cook for dinner, I noticed that the bird had bruises on both of its elbows. It is difficult to see food as both fellow animal and meal and this view does carry into my work.

Like many others today, I see food as a complicated comfort. This aspect of being attracted and repelled carries through in much of my work. I think it is part of looking at things as they are. Often my photographs delve into abstraction but the real, sometimes unsightly, aspects of life are still present; there is the bit of animal tissue floating in the soup or, as in another project, the dirt spots on the window.

As a younger person, I read Tolstoy and loved the multidimensional nature of his characters. The people in Tolstoy’s novels have the possibility for both good and evil and this makes one believe in the truthfulness of the writing, to believe that something real from life has been crafted in to the novel. I hope that the same is true in my photographs, that I have allowed the subject to bring with it those aspects from life that might not seem to fit with the estheticized object, so that through discord an authentic view of life is captured. The meat pictures are meant to say, it is a chicken or a pig or the fat rendered from the pig’s body and it is delicious and beautiful and horrible.

I came of age as an artist making sculpture and looking at the work of Joseph Beuys and others. I saw food as a legitimate material for art making and I made my first sculptures and photographs from fruit in the mid 1990’s. That work was made as sculpture and the photograph was a means to document the work. The food pictures from the 2010’s are an outgrowth of this earlier work but are in the tradition of two-dimensional art, and draw from both photography and painting.

All the food pictures came about either before or after I cooked something and when I saw the possibility for a photograph.