Heart-Shaped Tins & Other Kitchen Objects
Love, Loss And The Aftermath
"Objects can have about them a glow of significance, sending sparks of their own into the imagination of the beholder…" Susan M. Pearce, 1995
In one of the most painful moments of my life and transition, I came across and started reading Bee Wilson's recent book titled The Heart-Shaped Tin, where she blends her own experiences and stories with other culturally significant events. By making it relatable and intimate, the book explores the fundamental, irrational, and human urge to keep mementos. What makes an object or a thing significant? Is it its value, the memory, the shape, or the person who gifted it to us? What happens next to the original meaning when it is ruptured? When I try to answer these questions, I think of my own kitchen objects and utensils, as the kitchen is, or was, my sanctuary, my happy place where I cook for loved ones, experiment, and dance in. Now, not so much. At least, for the time being.
I look at my Japanese knife collection and think of him. I look at the silicone stirring spatulas that were gifted to me by him, and still use them, hoping that they will have happier days. I also have long-lost objects, such as my grandmother's china tea cup and lovely gifts from my mum, including my Ninja Air Fryer and my MagiMix food processor. At what point, though, do our kitchen objects become emotionally or politically charged things? How and when does the meaning change? Is it over time, or is it just with one act or a moment that it no longer signifies what it once was?
As this blog explores the intersection of art, food, and my new interest in anthropology, I will highlight some contemporary artists who work with kitchen objects, subverting their meaning or questioning their significance. They have all included personal, social, and cultural references in their practices. The first artist that comes to mind is Subodh Gupta (b. 1964), whose artistic practice often incorporates everyday objects, such as pots and pans, particularly steel kitchenware found in many Indian homes, to create large-scale installations and sculptures.Whether it is a cascade of gleaming pots and pans, tiffin boxes, and jugs tumbling down from a stainless-steel bucket or immaculately positioned and culturally loaded installations formed from various materials, Gupta explores themes of everyday life and cultural identity, by utilising these common household items that are found in India the artist subverts and questions the economic and social transformation of India, particularly the migration from rural to urban areas and the rise of globalised consumer culture. Another artist who embeds cooking and cooking utensils into his practice is Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961), best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around personal and shared communal traditions, such as cooking Thai meals that bring people together. Behind the supposedly simple cooking activity, there also lie complex issues, for example, those of his own cultural identity – as a Thai person who was educated in a system molded by Western values – or of the "authenticity" of dishes like pad thai, which Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram introduced at the end of the 1930s to encourage consumption of protein-rich rice noodles and bolster Thai national pride. Only those who look very closely will discover the manifold levels of meaning that hide behind Tiravanija's actions: The use of an electric wok from the brand "West Bend" in "pad thai (1990)" is a reference to the Martha Rosler's video performance "The East is Red, The West is Bending" (1977), in which the artist reflects on cultural appropriation, and it stands as an example of the usurpation of Eastern cultural goods by the West and their transformation into consumer goods.
Going beyond cultural and social critique, the British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) has created several artworks that utilise household objects scaled up or altered to make them familiar yet uncanny. Her work, Grater Divide (2002), mimics a room divider, like those used in changing rooms or hospitals. You'll notice, however, that this object is a 6-foot cheese grater. The piece is both comical and sinister, strangely graceful as a sculptural piece. The holes in the kitchen utensils are relatively harmless but scaled up to these proportions; they become threatening and potentially harmful. Mona Hatoum's Installation Home (1999) reveals a dangerous side to a familiar space, simultaneously shocking the viewer's awakened mind and conjuring up things once asleep. In Home, the viewer experiences an everyday space pulled apart and altered to reveal Hatoum's horrors. She has turned the kitchen from a room of nurture into a death trap. Upon a table, wires are haphazardly connected to a variety of metal kitchen utensils. Live electricity runs through the wires, causing the installation to crackle and hiss. Lightbulbs are placed within cheese graters and sieves, so when touched by electrical current, ominous flickers of light are cast across the table. When one spends enough time with the installation, the viewer's instincts turn to fear, which is enhanced by societal conditioning that associates the kitchen with safety.
The London-based Italian Artist Antonio Riello's (b. 1958) lockdown drawings, titled Confined Objects, are a deeply personal and tormented form of reportage on a kitchen'scape. At the time, what started as an obsessive production of a catalogue of his kitchen tools and food amassed to more than 300 drawings. These series have now become a work in progress, a taxonomic classification of every creature 'living' in the artist's domestic environment. "Riello's drawings are both frantic, yet very controlled, displaying a typically surrealist expression of anxiety and erotic drive similar to the renowned Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. These rigorously flat compositions of the Confined Objects echo his sculptural works and installations. The still life drawings of the objects surrounding his kitchen are multifaceted and layered not only in style but also in meaning" (Kabakci, H., 2022: Confined Objects at DANIELLE ARNAUD).
From all of these examples, we can see that kitchen objects are never just tools; they are intimate extensions of our hands, our routines, and our histories. Anthropologically, these objects accrue meaning through repeated use, embedded in cycles of nourishment, care, and ritual. Yet their emotional and political charge often crystallises in moments of disruption—a family argument at the dinner table, the act of feeding someone through grief, or the decision to stop cooking altogether. It is not only through time but also through transformative acts that their meanings shift. The formerly neutral colander becomes a relic of migration, having been used to drain rice in a new country; the pressure cooker is no longer just an appliance but a symbol of inherited gendered labour or resilience under economic strain. The kitchen is a stage where the mundane becomes monumental, where utensils absorb both memory and meaning until they become vessels of something far more profound than their form suggests.
This is beautiful writing Huma, I really enjoyed reading about these artists and the Mona Hatoum piece is a favourite of mine. I hope you are doing ok, sending love Jen