Bread tabs and spray paint on cradled wood panel

8x8x7/8"

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ART STATEMENT

A marriage of the Good Packaging Portrait series and the geometric/textile/recycled series, “Love Letters” explores my fascination and love/hate relationship with plastics, packaging and food.

For a brief moment, I worked in a commercial bakery, and while we didn’t use these tabs, we did have color-coded twisty-ties to signify the day of the week that we baked and packaged bread.

I prefer the colorful plastic bread tabs with codes on them. These little engineered slivers of plastic color help us know the freshness of the food we eat, close the packaging that holds the food, and symbolize one pair of many hands that our baked goods or produce passes through to end up in a grocery store, and finally in our home. I’ve been collecting them for years, and recently, supporters of my artwork have been sending them to me in the mail or pulling them out of pockets to give me when we meet*.

Food and the food industry are an incredibly daunting and complicated matter, not to mention the emotional ties we have to it. As a way to cope, I’ve personally had to shift my own perspective on food over the years and have settled on this: at the core, food is love, and at the same time, I will do my best to make better choices in regard to it while also giving myself tremendous amounts of grace.

We really are so separate from the source of our food when we shop in most grocery stores, but I like to imagine these little tabs as messages from the person who carefully packaged it up and sent it on its merry way.

*ALSO A FORM OF LOVE!