Dynamic ceramics Artist explores culinary choices By: Eva Wasney Posted: 3:35 PM CDT Friday, Jun. 9, 2023

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This article was published 09/06/2023 (1195 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It looks good from afar: a long table fitted with white linen and piled high with tiered cakes, frosted confections and colourful doughnuts.

Closer inspection, however, reveals a disturbing feast. Recognizable desserts topped with pallid pieces of meat, oozing entrails and disembodied doll’s heads. The gold confetti sprinkled throughout the buffet? Antibiotic gel capsules.

The centrepiece of Manitoba ceramic artist Julianna Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer’s first solo show, titled Stuffed and on display at the C2 Centre for Craft, speaks to her fascination with modern food production, gluttony and meticulous detail.

“I use cakes throughout my work to act as the vehicle to discuss more complicated and complex issues with our food systems,” she says, standing next to a five-layer sculpture of engorged, misshapen cow udders. “These items draw you in and then you’re quickly hit with something that can be beautiful and grotesque at the same time.”

Wearing a bright pink T-shirt and talking excitedly about her painstaking process, the artist’s bubbly personality is a contrast to her macabre subject matter.

“I often hear that I don’t match my work,” she says with a laugh.

Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer, 35, grew up on a grain farm near Morris with a big backyard garden and ample access to homegrown food. Her childhood was spent scratch-cooking with her babcia and listening to dinner-table conversations about agriculture and Big Pharma.

“My dad was a farmer and my mom was a pharmacist,” she says. “I would hear at home about how intertwined these two career paths and the industries behind them were.”

All of these influences — plus a year abroad in Poland, where small farms and open markets were plentiful — converged in art school.

Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer was studying art history and Polish at the University of Manitoba with plans to become a teacher when she got her first taste of ceramics.

“I just fell in love with it,” she says. “It was this immediate energy I felt with clay — that I could make something with my hands.

“It was kind of game over for this other plan that I thought I had for life.”

She dove hands-first into the medium at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design. While experimenting with throwing, sculpting and glazing, her thoughts turned to food.

The terms “natural” and “organic” were trending at the time — especially within the health-conscious culinary scene of her new West Coast home. The labels stirred up conflicting feelings for the artist, who had recently begun questioning the consumption of cow’s milk.

“Is it natural for us to drink milk that’s intended for a calf?” Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer says. “If we want natural, shouldn’t we be drinking our mother’s breast milk? And I noticed as I was posing those questions, people are extremely uncomfortable with that.”

She leaned into those visceral reactions through sculpture, creating towering pink cakes of veiny udders and protruding nipples.

Since returning home to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Manitoba, her art practice has expanded from the dairy industry to industrialized agriculture and consumption writ large. Her multimedia forays into photography and textiles are also on display at Stuffed, including self-portraits of the artist dousing herself in milk, and a pink fuzzy blanket emblazoned with cooked chickens and pills.

Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer’s style is influenced by the opulence depicted in the baroque and rococo art periods. The disconcerting spread in the middle of the gallery is presented in a non-threatening palette of light pinks and blues flecked with gold touches and delicate handmade flowers.

Each sculpture takes days to make. Starting with real pieces of food, she uses pork chops, chicken feet and cobs of corn to create plaster moulds. The result is an eerily lifelike ceramic rendition of familiar foodstuffs.

For Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer, the process of building a cake out of clay is similar to baking one out of flour. As in the kitchen, the avid cook uses piping bags and pastry tools to decorate her work while finishing the creations in a super-heated oven.

During grad school, the art student tapped into the U of M’s faculty of agriculture and food science, asking profs to point her in the direction of credible resources to inform her artwork. Stuffed touches on her research into antibiotic use in livestock farming, Western overconsumption and the disconnect created by a food system that aims to take death out of the equation for consumers.

By pulling back the curtain on how food is made and marketed in Canada, she’s opened a can of worms within her own diet.

“Oh gosh, I feel like I’ve been on a roller-coaster,” says Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer, who bounces between veganism, vegetarianism and omnivorism, depending on the context.

While the burden of knowledge can weigh heavy, she knows she’s not alone in her complicated feelings about food.

“I’ve had amazing conversations with people about food… and there’s so much complexity within those stories,” she says of audience reactions to Stuffed. “I don’t want my work to point the finger at the viewer and say you should or shouldn’t do these things.

“I want this work to draw the viewer in, but also create a safe space to open up conversations.”

In addition to making clay meat cakes, Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer sells functionally creepy ceramics — such as mugs and plates rimmed with human teeth — through local shops and craft markets. Find more of her work on Instagram (@juliannazrart).

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @evawasney