This body of work began in the late 1980’s where I spent my third year of art school in Florence, Italy. I started taking pictures of mannequins in store windows and juxtaposing them with photos of raw meat in butcher shop windows. As someone with an eating disorder that began in my teens, I had developed an interest in North American standards of beauty and the objectification of women, and I soon began to examine the conflict between the mind’s will and the body’s appetite through my artwork. I explored our complex and often fraught relationship with food through my sculpture, paintings, collages and photographs focusing mostly on meat. The power and mythology of meat and how it represents men as powerful (for example: as hunters, carvers, grillers) and women as weak (for example: as it is expressed in our language- chick, (fat) cow, (old) crow etc..) is an endless source of fascination for me. Much of my work juxtaposed images of meat and dead animals with materials and processes that are traditionally female (fabric, needlepoint, organic shapes). This contradiction of subject with a method and art form that is traditionally seen as women’s work explored gender stereotypes, objectivity, display and beauty as well as power, virility and control.