jamin london tinsel

A Chinese parable describes heaven and hell as being precisely the same: each is a huge banquet with sumptuous foods placed on round tables. Each person is seated at one of the round tables and given a pair of utensils five feet long. In hell, everyone struggles in isolation trying to eat with his own set of utensils and eventually starves to death. In heaven everyone uses his own set of utensils to serve the person directly across the table from him and no one goes hungry.

This performative piece was 1st conceived on a much smaller scale for Eat/Drink. In this version, honey slowly drips from 200 slip cast porcelain forms onto marshy beds of wheat grass. Participants were encouraged to interact with this edible installation.

These forms began as I was thinking about words like tension, swelling, and skin. Adding nipples to one of these forms was a stepping off point for many functional sculptures. I made worm-like figures with lots of fat rolls that turned out to all share resemblances so I called them the family. The auto body paint surface pushes these forms away from their earthy existence into some bizarre larval motorcycle form.

I created this interactive performance piece referencing the long history of ceramics coming into contact with the mouth. 12 participants were served a three-course meal “buffet style.” The 1st course entitled “Secret Sips Down Bowl River” offered an array of dippables to accompany absurd pacifier-like utensils. They took sips from ceramic straws that led to bulbous forms. The next course “Larval Sow Serves Warm Broth” was suckled; hot broth could be sucked from the sow’s nipples. The last course “Food Tube and Dessert Pods” offered a sweet, sensual and grotesque adventure.