Between making coffee and serving cassoulet

Part of my job description is to make regular chalk drawings on the blackboards at the restaurant Le petite Deux. Between making coffee and serving cassoulet i climb up and down the bent wood chairs to complete a 2.8x1.5m 'scribble'. As Le Petite is a French inspired restaurant the debut work is a Parisian street scene and I have plans for a boulangerie window. I am currently sitting on the forshore at Newcastle baths, between shifts, I have swum a few laps and am waiting elf or my hair to dry before I return for dinner service. With a full house tonight I am nervously rehearsing the food presentation Trout gravlax with bisque jelly, avocado and prawn veil; Duck breast with confit leg and orange glaze or was that lavender jus and cauliflower mousse ? I guess I'll find out in half an hour.

Material Developments

Whilst developing Nightmare on Sugar I experimented with rubber and the colour black. Whilst pastels and plush have been part of my material repertoire for a little while, the Gastro Porn exhibition prompted me to seek something more unsettling and sexually provocative. I felt it necessary to introduce a harsh contrast and a new element that would strip the plushies of their playful innocence and push them into the world of erotica. Rubber has seduced me in its own way as I find myself gritting my teeth in an unusual material pleasure when I twist and contort it, I like how it can strangle the textile so that soft plush oozes out. Images come to mind of hands on a piping bag squeezing out hollandaise sauce onto poached eggs. Like other Plush sculptures and installations Nightmare on Sugar is a hyper real piece, based on life, only this time it is indulging a little more in peculiar guilty pleasures of sensation, aroused by food and who knows what else....