Fiona Long Art

Blissful Ignorance

Originally uploaded by fionalongart.

My rabbit skin project was rather unpleasant to do but very rewarding. I am proud of myself for confronting my food and the processes behind it. I have already had some very interesting feedback regarding my rabbit project. Many people have been initially appalled, particularly by my process photos, seeing limbs and heads being cut off for example! I explained my feelings and beliefs about how if people eat meat then they should be aware of what it is that they are eating and how it got to their table. Meat is not just something you buy from the supermarket that comes in neat little packages, wrapped in cellophane. It was an animal and people should be in touch with that. Many of the people who were initially appalled did not just mellow their opinions but actually commended my work. I found this fascinating and was really pleased to have got this across so it made me want to take this work further. I think it is important to relate it to this day and age and the way that we are so out of touch with what meat actually is. This work has a conversation with my original rabbit piece. This piece relates directly to the modern day act of shopping and reflects our alienation from the process of meat manufacture. These plastic shopping bags are stretched over the metal shopping baskets in a similar way to the stretching of the rabbit skins onto the wooden hoops. I have used plastic cable ties instead of the natural string I used in the rabbit piece. Instead of the painted images I used in the previous piece I adhered digital photographs onto the plastic bags as I feel that these are the present day equivalent to cave paintings. These photographs show scenes of “modern man” locating a supermarket on the internet, driving in a car to the supermarket, looking at neatly packages chicken breast and processed chicken nuggets which are even further abstracted away from the original animal itself. Instead of dragging the beasts home, the produce will be shown being loaded into the plastic shopping bags and finally loaded into the fridge. I feel that the credit card transaction is the equivalent to “the kill”. I have used digital darkroom to turn these digital photographs into barcodes to demonstrate how the act of obtaining our meat nowadays is an act of consumerism.