Megan R . Fizell | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Papers by Megan R . Fizell
This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials... more This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the 'gastronomic body' to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art.In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence ...
In 2011, American academic Garrett Stewart surveyed artists using books as a sculptural medium in... more In 2011, American academic Garrett Stewart surveyed artists using books as a sculptural medium in Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. In this text, he identifies 'bookworkers' as a group of artists who 'set about reworking a found volume rather than fashioning a new one for publication or display'. 1 This essay will sample four contemporary 'bookworkers' engaging with bound books in involved, processheavy methods. Whether it is through deconstruction and collage, tangible language mapping, physical alterations of the actual pages, or painstaking duplication, these artists ask us to reconsider the boundaries of the printed and bound book.
FEAST Journal, 2012
An essay about Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca series.
Runway, 2015
Gastroporn, or The Sexualised Eater looks at the work of three women artists— Kawita Vatanajyanku... more Gastroporn, or The Sexualised Eater looks at the work of three women artists— Kawita Vatanajyankur, Elizabeth Willing, and Jodie Whalen—who use eating and food in their performances. These artists riff on the sexualisation of food and eating, and at the same time examine the fraught relationships between women and food in our culture.
IMPRINT, 2015
In the 1960s, artists began experimenting with food as a medium; from the performative meals at D... more In the 1960s, artists began experimenting with food as a medium; from the performative meals at Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery to the chocolate sculptures by Dieter Roth, the applications of this material were exploratory and wide-ranging. Examining the work of Martynka Wawrzyniak and Elizabeth Willing alongside the early practitioners demonstrates a new handling of this medium by contemporary artists.
Ceramics Monthly, 2011
Julie Green’s ongoing project against capital punishment relies heavily on historical and cultura... more Julie Green’s ongoing project against capital punishment relies heavily on historical and cultural ceramic conventions, from blue-and-white brush decoration to clay’s relationship to food.
Artlink, 2011
Review of Ken + Julia Yonetani’s exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl at Artereal Gallery and Mel... more Review of Ken + Julia Yonetani’s exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl at Artereal Gallery and Melting Moments by Janet Tavener at Incinerator Art Space
Curatorial by Megan R . Fizell
Aftertaste, 2023
Aftertaste | 15 April to 12 August 2023 | Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Fairfield, NSW. "Afte... more Aftertaste | 15 April to 12 August 2023 | Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Fairfield, NSW.
"Aftertaste" considers how food can act as a channel between a subject’s past, present, and future, activating and encoding memories that can connect individuals to a shared cultural experience or place. Following the work of anthropologists who describe shared sense memories as ‘cultural artefacts’, this exhibition underscores the important role the senses play in maintaining cultural ties to reveal how various forms of knowledge can be embedded and reactivated through sensory contact with food. Aftertaste will ignite conversations around culture, identity, and representation through tastes on the tongue by drawing together food-related artworks, including installations, videos, sculptures, and participatory tasting workshops.
Artists include Reanne Chidiac, Dylan Goh, Lindsay Kelley, Mylyn Nguyen, Mariam Slewo, James Tylor, Elizabeth Willing, Justine Youssef, Siying Zhou.
reminiSCENT | 25 July to 11 August 2018 | MAY SPACE, Sydney reminiSCENT surveys contemporary art... more reminiSCENT | 25 July to 11 August 2018 | MAY SPACE, Sydney
reminiSCENT surveys contemporary artists initiating multisensory experiences through olfactory encounters. Smelling is classified as a “bodily sense” in that along with touch and taste, in order to be ‘known’ or perceived, they need to be experienced with the body. Scent receptors are located in the olfactory cortex, a zone of the brain that overlaps with the limbic system, the area responsible for some memories and emotion. As a result, scents are often linked to memories and form associations that are highly individualised and subjective. The artworks in this exhibition privilege the sense of smell over that of vision and emphasise memory as understood through bodily engagement.
Artists include Jo Burzynska, David Capra, Todd Fuller, Liz Henderson, Melinda Le Guay, Jayne McSwiney, Archie Moore, Mylyn Nguyen, Bill Noonan, Susanna Strati, Janet Tavener, Claire Anna Watson, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Melinda Young.
Sugar, Sugar | 1 to 19 October 2013 | Brenda May Gallery, Sydney This exhibition featured contem... more Sugar, Sugar | 1 to 19 October 2013 | Brenda May Gallery, Sydney
This exhibition featured contemporary art made exclusively with sugar by ten female artists. By embodying the ephemeral nature of the substance, many of the installations only lasted for the duration of the exhibition.
As a species, we are predisposed to seek out sugar to supplement our diet. “Sweet tooth” and “sugar rush” are colloquial phrases used to describe our bodies’ cravings for and reaction to the substance. Our inclination to seek out the sweet stuff speaks to the pervasiveness of sugar in the visual arts.
Artists included Matina Bourmas, Irianna Kanellopoulou, Judith Klausner, Stephanie Jones, Claire McArdle, Shelley Miller, Mylyn Nguyen, Janet Tavener, Claire Anna Watson, and Elizabeth Willing.
Talks by Megan R . Fizell
SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections., 2022
Talk presented at "SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections." hosted by Museums & Galleries of NSW at t... more Talk presented at "SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections." hosted by Museums & Galleries of NSW at the Art Gallery of of New South Wales on 21 September 2022.
This talk surveys curatorial projects staging multisensory encounters where audiences see, hear, feel, smell, and sometimes taste the artworks on show. It will also touch on logistical challenges connected to exhibiting ephemeral, intangible, and edible materials. Key projects include Sugar, Sugar (2013), an exhibition featuring ten female artists using sugar as the primary material in immersive and interactive artworks, and reminiSCENT (2018), an exhibition of olfactory artworks exploring the relationship between scent and memory. These projects consider how food-based art invites subjects to contribute their own memories, associations, and appetites to their embodied experience of the sensorial pleasures or displeasures aroused by the artwork.
The Last Supper: A Sustainability Talk, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, 12 April 2014 ... more The Last Supper: A Sustainability Talk, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, 12 April 2014
A talk on the history of still life painting with a focus on the depiction of salt and its use by contemporary artists.
Thesis Chapters by Megan R . Fizell
This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials... more This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the ‘gastronomic body’ to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art.
In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence or shape a subject’s perception. Referencing key examples of food art, I trace a lineage of art that employs edible materials from the Futurist banquets of the early 20th century to neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s. Artists including Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, and Daniel Spoerri used foodstuffs in various applications from object-based work to participatory, performance, and installation art. I also examine food-based artwork from the 1990s by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Janine Antoni and more recent examples, including 21st-century edible installations by Elizabeth Willing and Sonja Alhäuser.
This examination of food art shows how the imagined dimensions of sensory experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of the ‘virtual body’ link sensory perception and encultured experience. I uncover how sociocultural customs and norms shape bodily responses and sensory feelings from pleasure to displeasure through the lens of Silvan S. Tomkins’s psychological approach to affect theory. The gastronomic body bridges the sensory with the sociocultural to map the spectrum of sensations, memories, and gestures activated through the embodied experience of food art, connecting past and present, body and mind, self and others.
This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials... more This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the 'gastronomic body' to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art.In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence ...
In 2011, American academic Garrett Stewart surveyed artists using books as a sculptural medium in... more In 2011, American academic Garrett Stewart surveyed artists using books as a sculptural medium in Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. In this text, he identifies 'bookworkers' as a group of artists who 'set about reworking a found volume rather than fashioning a new one for publication or display'. 1 This essay will sample four contemporary 'bookworkers' engaging with bound books in involved, processheavy methods. Whether it is through deconstruction and collage, tangible language mapping, physical alterations of the actual pages, or painstaking duplication, these artists ask us to reconsider the boundaries of the printed and bound book.
FEAST Journal, 2012
An essay about Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca series.
Runway, 2015
Gastroporn, or The Sexualised Eater looks at the work of three women artists— Kawita Vatanajyanku... more Gastroporn, or The Sexualised Eater looks at the work of three women artists— Kawita Vatanajyankur, Elizabeth Willing, and Jodie Whalen—who use eating and food in their performances. These artists riff on the sexualisation of food and eating, and at the same time examine the fraught relationships between women and food in our culture.
IMPRINT, 2015
In the 1960s, artists began experimenting with food as a medium; from the performative meals at D... more In the 1960s, artists began experimenting with food as a medium; from the performative meals at Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery to the chocolate sculptures by Dieter Roth, the applications of this material were exploratory and wide-ranging. Examining the work of Martynka Wawrzyniak and Elizabeth Willing alongside the early practitioners demonstrates a new handling of this medium by contemporary artists.
Ceramics Monthly, 2011
Julie Green’s ongoing project against capital punishment relies heavily on historical and cultura... more Julie Green’s ongoing project against capital punishment relies heavily on historical and cultural ceramic conventions, from blue-and-white brush decoration to clay’s relationship to food.
Artlink, 2011
Review of Ken + Julia Yonetani’s exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl at Artereal Gallery and Mel... more Review of Ken + Julia Yonetani’s exhibition Still Life: The Food Bowl at Artereal Gallery and Melting Moments by Janet Tavener at Incinerator Art Space
Aftertaste, 2023
Aftertaste | 15 April to 12 August 2023 | Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Fairfield, NSW. "Afte... more Aftertaste | 15 April to 12 August 2023 | Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Fairfield, NSW.
"Aftertaste" considers how food can act as a channel between a subject’s past, present, and future, activating and encoding memories that can connect individuals to a shared cultural experience or place. Following the work of anthropologists who describe shared sense memories as ‘cultural artefacts’, this exhibition underscores the important role the senses play in maintaining cultural ties to reveal how various forms of knowledge can be embedded and reactivated through sensory contact with food. Aftertaste will ignite conversations around culture, identity, and representation through tastes on the tongue by drawing together food-related artworks, including installations, videos, sculptures, and participatory tasting workshops.
Artists include Reanne Chidiac, Dylan Goh, Lindsay Kelley, Mylyn Nguyen, Mariam Slewo, James Tylor, Elizabeth Willing, Justine Youssef, Siying Zhou.
reminiSCENT | 25 July to 11 August 2018 | MAY SPACE, Sydney reminiSCENT surveys contemporary art... more reminiSCENT | 25 July to 11 August 2018 | MAY SPACE, Sydney
reminiSCENT surveys contemporary artists initiating multisensory experiences through olfactory encounters. Smelling is classified as a “bodily sense” in that along with touch and taste, in order to be ‘known’ or perceived, they need to be experienced with the body. Scent receptors are located in the olfactory cortex, a zone of the brain that overlaps with the limbic system, the area responsible for some memories and emotion. As a result, scents are often linked to memories and form associations that are highly individualised and subjective. The artworks in this exhibition privilege the sense of smell over that of vision and emphasise memory as understood through bodily engagement.
Artists include Jo Burzynska, David Capra, Todd Fuller, Liz Henderson, Melinda Le Guay, Jayne McSwiney, Archie Moore, Mylyn Nguyen, Bill Noonan, Susanna Strati, Janet Tavener, Claire Anna Watson, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Melinda Young.
Sugar, Sugar | 1 to 19 October 2013 | Brenda May Gallery, Sydney This exhibition featured contem... more Sugar, Sugar | 1 to 19 October 2013 | Brenda May Gallery, Sydney
This exhibition featured contemporary art made exclusively with sugar by ten female artists. By embodying the ephemeral nature of the substance, many of the installations only lasted for the duration of the exhibition.
As a species, we are predisposed to seek out sugar to supplement our diet. “Sweet tooth” and “sugar rush” are colloquial phrases used to describe our bodies’ cravings for and reaction to the substance. Our inclination to seek out the sweet stuff speaks to the pervasiveness of sugar in the visual arts.
Artists included Matina Bourmas, Irianna Kanellopoulou, Judith Klausner, Stephanie Jones, Claire McArdle, Shelley Miller, Mylyn Nguyen, Janet Tavener, Claire Anna Watson, and Elizabeth Willing.
SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections., 2022
Talk presented at "SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections." hosted by Museums & Galleries of NSW at t... more Talk presented at "SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections." hosted by Museums & Galleries of NSW at the Art Gallery of of New South Wales on 21 September 2022.
This talk surveys curatorial projects staging multisensory encounters where audiences see, hear, feel, smell, and sometimes taste the artworks on show. It will also touch on logistical challenges connected to exhibiting ephemeral, intangible, and edible materials. Key projects include Sugar, Sugar (2013), an exhibition featuring ten female artists using sugar as the primary material in immersive and interactive artworks, and reminiSCENT (2018), an exhibition of olfactory artworks exploring the relationship between scent and memory. These projects consider how food-based art invites subjects to contribute their own memories, associations, and appetites to their embodied experience of the sensorial pleasures or displeasures aroused by the artwork.
The Last Supper: A Sustainability Talk, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, 12 April 2014 ... more The Last Supper: A Sustainability Talk, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, 12 April 2014
A talk on the history of still life painting with a focus on the depiction of salt and its use by contemporary artists.
This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials... more This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the ‘gastronomic body’ to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art.
In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence or shape a subject’s perception. Referencing key examples of food art, I trace a lineage of art that employs edible materials from the Futurist banquets of the early 20th century to neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s. Artists including Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, and Daniel Spoerri used foodstuffs in various applications from object-based work to participatory, performance, and installation art. I also examine food-based artwork from the 1990s by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Janine Antoni and more recent examples, including 21st-century edible installations by Elizabeth Willing and Sonja Alhäuser.
This examination of food art shows how the imagined dimensions of sensory experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of the ‘virtual body’ link sensory perception and encultured experience. I uncover how sociocultural customs and norms shape bodily responses and sensory feelings from pleasure to displeasure through the lens of Silvan S. Tomkins’s psychological approach to affect theory. The gastronomic body bridges the sensory with the sociocultural to map the spectrum of sensations, memories, and gestures activated through the embodied experience of food art, connecting past and present, body and mind, self and others.