Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Mark Moskovitz
Meat Plate, 2006 © Mark Moskovitz
connectedness of meat and plant. Potentially
omnivorous vessels, they also highlight ways in
which all consumption entails a form of death, an
annihilation. The artist describes her work as a
blending of “macabre and the beautiful” that
references the duality of “fragility and resiliency” in
life. Meat art in clay and meat metaphors in the
field of ceramics seem to work within and
between these tensions and contrasts, inviting the
artist and the viewer to question both “natural”
associations between clay and meat and those
juxtapositions that make us more uncomfortable
(and perhaps more thoughtful) about various
forms of life and choices about ingestion.
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Concluding Comments:
Ceramic Conceptions and Constructs of
Meat
This article has touched on a sampling of overt
and subtle references to meat and flesh among
clay artists. However, many artists also work within
contexts more often associated with clay, but
rendered in meat as an art material. Betty Hirst’s
Hommage a Meret Oppenheim is a cup, spoon,
and saucer made of bacon. Simone Rachell’s
Water Closet is a toilet made out of meat, which
also draws our attention to forms generally
rendered in porcelain and/or stoneware.