Our Daily Bread

Using her own distinctive method to create sculptures in the shape of food and foodstuffs, Fudamoto Ayako’s practice visualizes links and unexpected relationships between people and the society we live in. Her consideration of food in our day-to-day lives is an attempt to expand our perception and sensibilities regarding food. Unlike food samples, her works, made with great attention to detail, and a particular focus on texture, do not necessarily look appetizing, but that may be because they vividly represent human desire and issues surrounding food.
Long interested in the line drawn between food and things that are not food, Fudamoto focuses on beef in this exhibition. Her attention is on the obvious, but normally overlooked, fact that the beef that we casually eat was originally part of a cow that was dismembered in order to produce this foodstuff. She depicts the process dispassionately. Having visited ranches and meat-processing factories and also being influenced by the documentary film Our Daily Bread (2005), which deals with everything from the production to the consumption of food, the artist attempts to restore our ability to imagine the state the cattle’s flesh was in before it became meat for consumption, something we have unconsciously blocked out of our minds. The work Steak Rocks—which is based on the artist’s own experience of happening across some mortar at the side of the road that looked like steak due to traces of wire netting—suggests how we can be stimulated to perceive something as food at unexpected times, even in completely unrelated contexts.
By tracing the series of processes leading from the neck and carcass of a cow to meat served as a meal, Fudamoto guides the viewer to an awareness of the transitional area between farm and table where animals are turned into food, a realm that we normally do not think about.