Marlise Keith at iArt Gallery

The Gluttony of Eve: Inside every piggy there is a Twiggy

In her latest body of work Blight, Marlise Keith is concerned with the ways in which we use and live with “nourishing” metaphors. The term “blight” refers to the discolouring and eventual death of plants as a result of incapacity to produce sufficient chlorophyll.

The disease is most commonly associated with potatoes and was responsible for the Great Irish Famine in the mid 1800s. In this exhibition, Keith draws on her encounters with people and food, or more specifically, people who eat food or don’t or can’t.

On the one hand food can be a metaphor for health, prosperity or luxury, or as is pointed out in the extract from Lee Allen’s thoughts on potatoes, the metaphor of food can have equally damaging connotations. Keith recalls a girl she once taught who was slowly starving herself.

The exhibition will showcase two of Keith’s hallmark metres-long drawings, aptly described by an art critic as “an image with no beginning or end as the river of life, with its moments of happiness, suffering, dreams and horrors carries on endlessly.” Marked off by a Dressmaker's marking wheel and T-Square, these drawings are sold by the metre.

Also included on the exhibition are a series of “Hungry Eyes” – a metaphor for judgement developed by the artist during a residency in Paris in 2006 – and a number of small works on paper incorporating measuring tapes.

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