Gina Matchitt's large scale fast food-shaped works in Sweet'n'Sour hint at issues. She is currently living in America where super-size is the norm for everything including the people. And of course it is impossible to walk the streets of New Zealand without seeing the impact of fast-food here, to say nothing of the health problems caused by diabetes etc etc.
The two works pictured above, Large Fries and Pipi and Marinara, feature images of fresh food and the Maori boil-up, and shell fish and pasta respectively.
Gina residency last year at Centre d’Art Marnay just outside of Paris focused on food culture. She considered the relationship that cultures (in this case French) that retain their lands have with their food culture, comparing this to the Maori experience. She found that even fast food in France is reasonably high quality.
In Happy Meal pictured below, Gina weaves together these two food cultures into the shape of a Happy Meal container. The imagery of kumara blends with a vegetable dish in half the work, and a boil-up with cherries in the other half. The boil-up and kumara become fragmented by the weaving but the cherries and vegetables hold their own.
But then I have been sitting opposite the work for the past month considering its meaning, and dreaming of summer fruits... food imagery is potent overall.
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