You’ve probably never considered the poetic potential of a Styrofoam takeaway container, but then you’re probably not Nicholas Hatfull. The 2011 Royal Academy Schools graduate trawls through the forms and designs of food packaging, repurposing the most ubiquitous and disposable items into surreal, sometimes acerbic comments on consumer culture.
Enlarged coffee-cup lids in brilliant colours are mounted on walls like blazing suns, or incorporated into dioramas behind stencilled wooden panels whose outlines of coffee-beans and waving African grasslands suggest, ironically, a sort of back-to-nature theme.
Elsewhere, wooden plinths, like identikit café tabletops, display oversize sandwich cartons as sculptural forms. The strongest, strangest works are Hatfull’s large, fiery-coloured screenprints, in which product warning labels and various foodstuffs combine into absurdist, totemic depictions – such as a sliced-bread car with lemon-slices for wheels (‘Expert Pruning Across Town IV’). According to a lengthy artist’s statement, which takes up an entire wall, the idea is to imagine the dreamlife of fast-food ingredients – as if sandwich fillings and processed coffees fantasised about a purer, more ennobling state.
It’s an entertaining and provocative thought, even if the text itself is overwritten. Still, the core concept – of yearning for a kind of culinary authenticity, and the way that such desires are exploited by the world of retail – remains extremely powerful.
Gabriel Coxhead