A sweet tooth leads to trouble

Go - The Hamilton Spectator, Tuesday October 18th, 2005
By Regina Haggo


You can have your cake, but don’t eat it. For Sweet Fresh, her latest exhibition at the Transit Gallery, Fiona Kinsella offers us cakes that are tempting – and troubling.

The Hamilton artist is well-known for filling boxes and shadow boxes with gathered objects that stir and provoke the imagination. A recent pilgrimage to Prague enabled her to come up with the finishing touches for the 15 boxes in this show, her best ever.

Prague is a city that is ancient and beautiful, almost to the point of decadence. Beauty is the first impression a viewer has on seeing Kinsella’s work.

Shelves along one wall are covered in fine white tablecloths topped with lace doilies. Because the shelves are not visible, the cloths appear to be floating in space. On each shelf rests a transparent box containing what looks like a small cake coated with white icing and icing-sugar flowers.

Similar white cakes in see-through boxes lie on a table covered with a white cloth. Others are enclosed in framed shadow boxes hanging on the wall.

Initially, the display evokes the kind of pleasure one gets on entering a cake shop with neatly ordered goodies for sale. The whiteness of the cakes, lace and fabric reminds us of rituals marking beginnings such as christenings and weddings. Lace and white cloths are also reminiscent of the vestments worn by priests during rituals.

White is an appropriate colour for all these ceremonies because it stands for purity and innocence, but white also has links to death. It is, for example, the colour of mourning in ancient civilizations. In Christianity white is sometimes associated with violent death. In the early church, white was worn by martyrs in paradise. White is also the colour of the lamb of God, a symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death.

As we continue to contemplate Kinsella’s boxes, the initial image of beauty begins to unravel because Kinsella has added visual surprises. These are likely to elicit a frisson of horror.

In one of the boxes, (cake) Extracted, from the jaw of a boy, a fork lies on top of the cake. At first, it looks as though there are some crumbs stuck to the fork. These are not, however crumbs, but teeth. Their presence hints at a rite of passage, misadventure or pain.

In (cake) fear (Osenary), a medal of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child sits on top of a cake. It’s traditional in Eastern European Christianity to connect Christ’s childhood with his death. So Kinsella creates the same link by sticking hat pins into the cake, and we think of the instruments of Christ’s suffering.

Kinsella adds a few shed cat claws, bringing together animal and spiritual beings, considered in centuries past to be at opposite of the chain of being.

The shadow boxes are lined with a sumptuous red fabric that suggests both beauty and blood. Appropriately, (cake) Wound II (St. Agnes) pays homage to St. Agnes, who was beheaded for not giving up her virginity or her christianity. One of the four pins stuck into the cake bares a tuft of lamb’s wool, which associates Agnes’s name and death with that of the sacrificail lamb (agnus in Latin).

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Cantebury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.

Showtime:
Who: Fiona Kinsella
What: sweet fresh
Where: Transit Gallery, 230 Locke St. S.
When: Until Oct. 30
Phone: 905-522-1299