*Seditious Delicious:*
A Taste of Art

From March 18 to May 9, the Crawford Arts Centre in St. Andrews will be mounting an exhibition curated by postgraduate students on the museum and gallery studies course at the University of St Andrews entitled Seditious Delicious: A Taste of Art . The event, which is part of a series of exhibitions across Fife on the theme of food and drink, will focus on the seductive/ repulsive aspects of food and food as it relates to body image. Work for the exhibition will be provided by 9 artists from across the UK and each artist will present work using a variety of media.

Introduction:

Seditious Delicious: A Taste of Art explores the nature of food and its consumption. As a source of nourishment and nutrition, food is essential for life. Yet, images of food's more sinister side have long been held in the Western cultural consciousness: from the Fall of Adam and Eve, to Hogarth's 18 th century gluttonous feasts. This contradictory role that food plays in culture, society and psychology is still an important focus for modern-day art.

Seditious Delicious: A Taste of Art brings together nine contemporary artists based in Britain, whose investigations into food are as seditious as they are delicious. This duality is revealed in both everyday and abstract contexts, through a diverse range of media. Edible products like meat or icing are used to challenge the formal boundaries and applications of food itself, but the transformations that food causes in people are also studied, using methods like photography and etching.

Seditious Delicious: A Taste of Art suggests many thematically related issues. The capacity to be both tempted and repelled by food is important in several works, while the action of eating is presented as both an animalistic need and a decadent extravagance. The topical subject of healthy eating is approached, as are the pressures associated with body image. Some works respond to food's roles in society, and the implicit taboos that shape people's lives, such as means of food preparation or observation of abstinences. Other works deliberately remove food from its ordinary context, forcing the viewer to look beyond their familiar experiences and expectations of it.

Each artist reveals yet another angle to the central theme, inspiring the on-going replacement of old assumptions. The only remaining certainty is humanity's enduring fascination for food.