Isla Macer Law

‘We wanted to eat, not look around at other people.  We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with.  We didn't need light and space.  We certainly didn’t need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross network of signals and codes.  We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigour in this.’

Don Delillo, White Noise

Familiar relations play out across a kitchen. I set the scene and the table. The utensils interpret and materialise unspoken patterns of behaviour that run beneath a wipe-clean surface. Time is spent together. Shifting layers of the past, present and future mingle over cups of tea. White bread sandwiches have the crusts cut off. Memories, picked up on a fork, are chewed and digested. Tasty. 

Conversation gradually turns back to the weather. 

Deploying the authentic trace alongside the theatrical and the constructed, I explore the ways in which female identity can be performed through domestic objects at the limit of their functionality. Situated within personal narrative, this body of work seeks to reflect on wider questions of authenticity in relation to the inheritance of personal and cultural histories.