BORN FREE

Title of Work: Born Free
cake decorated with profanities, flowers, inscribes with names of feminist artists/writers/thinkers, female punk-rockers/lyrics from selected songs


Born Free is partly inspired by the tension between female respectability and purity (in appearance and/or reality) against the rigidity of women’s roles/social expectations in some societies. Though not only.

The work is self-consciously domesticated – to reclaim a rebellious voice, by subterfuge and irony if necessary . The baking of cake references several cultural markers – Laura Brown from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, the rigidity and perfection expected from proper wives and good homemakers in Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives and Sylvia Plath’s endless baking which ended in suicide via the gassing of head in oven. The inscription of names is an homage in cake to the good, the bad, the broken - a private party for one and an imaginary many, a séance-in-arms channelling kindred rebels, misfits and outsiders through space-time-history who can’t help but burn kitchens intoxicated.
Cake is edible but has alternate function as a projectile missile.