"The Supper"
Live Performance
California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo
2026
Live Performance
California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo
2026
Stills from "The Supper". Photos by Mars Gunderson and Elizabeth Folk.
Dressed as a 1950s housewife, I prepare and serve a dinner for eight participants. Arranged on pristine baby pink ceramicware, the meal is revealed to be strangely bodily. Chunks of flesh, braided hair, fingernails, pearls, and dark red fluid all in the place of food. I serve only the male identifying participants, those who are not are left to serve themselves.
As the meal is untouched, I become increasingly agitated, obsessive, and insecure. I begin repeatedly adjusting the dinnerware and moving the food in small, repeated gestures. Beneath the objects, handwritten words begin to emerge: "why," "why aren't you eating." I begin to repeat these words out loud, collapsing the distinction between the written plea and the embodied one.
I begin serving the food with my hands, becoming covered in the fluids and remains of the meal. Through this transformation, the boundaries between host, body, and food begin to blur. Where does one end and the other begin in this ritual?
The work examines gendered labor, identity, and performance of domestic roles. Informed by theories of abjection, the work uses bodily connotation and imagery to approach experiences of familial trauma and the mother wound.