COCKTAIL COURSE

A beeswax vessel with the shape of a potato moulded into its centre was the next course to be presented to the audience. Once received a small hole with a thin beeswax membrane was to be pierced and the nectar-like contents drunken with a straw. The taste of perfume and valerian mingling with the smell of honey describes my initial experience of this course. Once drunken, it felt similarly to draining a cellular entity of all its life-force as one sucked its contents from its shell-like existence.

For this sequence I wanted to get under the earth of a crop, like trying to get inside something. As you drain the contents of the beeswax chamber the liquid courses through your body down into the gut along many curves of the intestines. A giant field of undulating flowers along with marijuana plants rise and fall, a force unto itself. This tidal wave constrains the space of the screen, the camera is set close to the action like the audience’s mouth to the sculpture, moving through this energy field.

The Host: Cocktail Course (still image), Kitchen Studio, 2024, High Definition, 1080×1920 (9:16, Portrait), 31.17mins, looped. Sound: Anna Whittaker

Smell and aroma are a powerful force, transmutation is just one of these realities that pull the body and mind in different directions. When I smell Channel No.5 it conjures up a specific person and an era in my life that quickly transforms into a feeling of nostalgia. One state transform into another. This feeling can be radioactive, traumatic or it could be pleasurable, even desirable depending on the individual circumstances and experiences across time.

From here the sequence moves into a still scene of rotating flowers that has been constructed to imitate the now hollow form of the drunken beeswax vessel. Steam slowly rises and evaporates from this structure as the camera finds its way into the interior space of this hollow body.

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