With recessed spaces either side of the domestic fireplace bulging with a sculptural montage of organic-looking matter, the walls look alive. In the semi-dilapidated shell of a suburban home, the artistic intervention is camouflaged against the stripped back decayed fabric of the space, blurring the line between the artistic acts and those of damp, decay, or de-decoration of the space in preparation for its next reimagining.

A digital print Mortadella montage (2016) hangs from a wall which itself carries the same pockmarked aesthetic after the stripping of wallpapers. A cactus sits to the side, the pot its in with a surface made of cast salami, and next to it on the side table a plaster cast of a petrified sandwich.

Everything seems edible, or regurgitated, or at some stage of a process between. Whitton says she was considering the home as a body, “and the exposed structure of the space an opportunity to make abstract and uncanny connections to the softness and vulnerability of the building."




It is that duality of the two encasements of the self - architecture and body - which Whitton seeks to explore, both with skins which index “personal and intimate experiences”. The artist has a curiosity with foodstuffs, both how an individual psychologically perceives well as ingests it, and the cultural objectness of food is tested in her work, by transforming the organic into a frozen cast. Then other materials are imbued with a sense of the organic, resulting in a hovering between life and imitation, edible and ornamental.

The installation was exhibited as part of the 2019 group exhibition, Strange At The House: A Group Show Exploring the Domestic Uncanny, which Whitton co-curated alongside Mollie Tearne.