back gallery: deborah prior (sa) & jess taylor - deep, dark, desperate / eat your saints

A conversation between two artists using wax, chocolate, and their bodies.

Deep, Dark, Desperate / Eat Your Saints is a multi-sensory installation and performance exploring individual and collective acts of violence through a Feminist lens. Engaging with the morally ambiguous, voyeuristic pleasures of horror films, acts of brutality from the canons of art and anatomy, and the martyrdom of saints, Taylor and Prior have taken casts from their own bodies and are offering them up as sacrificial vessels.

Realised in wax and chocolate, these vessels are intended to be destroyed and consumed – by both the artists and audience – slipping between liquid/solid in a transformative process evoking magic, miracles, and entropy. As a historically bodily material, wax recorded the physical presence of the dead or diseased. Chocolate is equally fleshy, but an object of desire, and a reminder of the Dangerous Appetites of Women.

Through abject, simulated acts of immolation and cannibalism, the artists will confront the extreme cultural unease surrounding female bodies and identities.