i need you, i love you

monoprints, 2009–10



Print series commissioned by Rabelais (Portland, ME) in response to the book Food for Thought: Thought for Food, by Vincent Todoli and Richard Hamilton about master chef Ferran Adria. The work was displayed and entered into Actar D's Food For Thought/Thought for Food Display contest, where it won first prize for Best North American Entry.

Special thanks to Lisa Pixley and Pickwick Independent Press, where this work was created, for their generosity and spirit of experimentation.

Let Me Melt Beneath Your Tongue
monoprint: pear, ink, xerox transfer

title line from Advertisement, by Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Is Ever Going To Last
monoprint: beet, xerox transfer

shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you
olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of the coastal fig?

I put them on paper, too, so fragile.     for nothing is ever going to last

D.A. Powell, from corydon & alexis

Appetite, You Wolf
monoprint: beet, xerox transfer

i wear feathers and wool, a heavy beet in the hand
rattlesnakes weep in the shallow light     viscera glitter in your teeth
these amulets, these prizes     a yowl of some choking animal

somewhere a finger passes over an apple or muscle
spangled fat     the kiss of paper     insect shells
hewn with the smell of mud or pine     you cook me, lover

dictate me bite by bite and still i would eat
appetite    you wolf, i ferment at your table

You Gnaw Me There, Underneath My Skin
monoprint: onion skin, ink, xerox transfer


I Love You
monoprint: lemon, ink, xerox transfer

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.

Wendy Cope, The Orange

Finding Something Good To Eat
monoprint: carrot, ink, xerox transfer

The sheer novelty of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power – thirty-two billion dollars a year – used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it: used by the industry to sell more nutritionally "enhanced" processed food and to undermine further the authority of traditional food cultures that stand in the way of fast food. Industry greatly amplifies the claims of nutritional science through its advertising and, through its sponsorship of self-serving nutritional research corrupts it. The predictable result is the general cacophony of nutritional information ringing in our ears and the widespread confusion that has come to surround this most fundamental of creaturely activities: finding something good to eat.

Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

I'm So Hungry
monoprint: fish, ink, xerox transfer