MEAT
SALT CRUST
SO SOFT
CLOSED THE DOOR QUIET
TO BARK AT THIS BREACH
THE HEEL, THE FLOOD
I AM AT WAR
I AM, WILL, WERE, ARE
.
WEIGHED WET TO PREP
TO WRITE MY OWN APOCALYPSE
.
SO SHOULD I HAVE
SHOULD HAVE GONE DANCING
SHOULD HAVE BEEN FED
LIGHT A SILENT NEIGHBOR
KEPT SOUNDS OF WHAT WAS SAID
SO SHOULD I HAVE
SHOULD HAVE GONE DANCING
SHOULD HAVE BEEN FED)”
.
2026, bone-in spare ribs, chain
48 × 24 inches
Cookbook on grilling, Price Chopper weekly ads, Fifty Shades of Poultry on paper
Transfer from linoleum ink- printed chicken breasts on BFK paper
22 x 30 inches
2026
Series of 3
I wanted to get back into meat. I hadn’t felt drawn to meat as material since August or September and didn’t know if forcing it would be generative. A few semesters, ago in response to my anxieties that I’d somehow one day lose my momentum, a professor on my BFA committee told me that “work makes work.” It stuck with me.
The same professor has gently encouraged me to explore printmaking (her specialization) for years, and I never do. I believe that the labor and overhead printmaking requires is creatively limiting and riddled with redundancies that conflict with my urgent and intuitive creative methods. Yet, thinking about meat and what meat means and what work means, I got my hands on a piece of linoleum and carved out the mantra, hoping this would jog something up. I asked the professor what meat she would be, if she were a meat. She said chicken breast because she eats it a lot. I remembered she mentioned shopping at Whole Foods anecdotally and went to Whole Foods and bought a pack of raw chicken breast. I had intended for the chicken breasts themselves to be the final product, and for photographs to be documentation of their existence as ephemeral works, so when I rolled the ink on my lino-cut text block, printed the first breast, then realized it was backward, I felt like the stupidest girl in the entire world. I hadn’t worked with linoleum since 9th grade when art club at my high school made valentines. I forgot that to get legible text, I had to carve the words backwards.
The last time I worked with meat, I used a sheet of BFK as a plain background for documentation. When I picked the steak up from the paper, the moisture and musculature of the steak left a beautiful filigree pattern. It was the true victor of that particular project and I hung the off-centered-steak-printed sheet of BFK in my studio and admired it daily. Remembering this, I stamped the breasts themselves down onto paper and got the legible text I’d envisioned, with a bonus of a slightly warped indentation from the moisture of the meat. I felt happy, and then it took me 2 hours to clean up the ink from the breyers and linoleum and sink and sheets of plastic and I had meant to be home by 9 but 9:15 rolled around and I was tired and hungry and covered in oily ink and I resolved never to make a print again in my life. I yelled on the phone to John about this resolution and all the work I had to do to clean up and he laughed because I was yelling about chicken breast and it made the work much more fun and the yelling much less serious. My hands were stained red for days. Work makes work and work makes work makes work.