meditation on toast
Ever since I started working with toasters I have been thinking a lot about toast.
Following on from my washing machine obsession I had been keen to continue exploring the material and metaphorical opportunities represented in the transformative functions of everyday devices. The opportunity subsequently presented to me in the form of a toasting oven from my classmate Armando, resulted in a sculptural installation work The Purge. Now I have a studio littered with the detritus of toaster remnants and I feel that there is more to be mined from this most mundane of objects.
What does the act of toasting represent? Half awake suck the moisture out of bread. Both my parents, for example, are liable to do this to even to the freshest, tastiest of loaves - not slightly crispy, but powder dry. Perhaps the sharpness of the crunch serves to send off the last remnants of sleep. To end one diurnal cycle, one loaf, and begin the next.
When I was a child, my mother baked bread, setting it to rise in a huge enamel bowl and breaking it to make sixteen loaves at a time. On baking days, the pungent smell of reproducing yeast would fill the kitchen and we would breed dough people from the off-cuts. Read here: bread of life.
So if bread is life, is toast a cindery death - ‘We’ll all be toast mate’ - in the oven of our times? The heat is on. We’re gonna burn - in the hell of … (Select your own cult of the apocalypse here). End one cycle and begin the next.