Strange + Wonderful = Mary Catherine Newcomb's "Product of Eden"

If you're passing through Kitchener, as I was on the weekend, you'd be silly not to stop off at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and see what's growing in the front garden. There, Mary Catherine Newcomb has installed a series of infant-shaped moulds -- there's three words I never thought I'd use together -- that are providing form to an array of eggplants and squashes now growing to full maturity.

She calls it Product of Eden -- an ongoing project -- and there's an obvious parallel being drawn here between human gestation and its place in the broader natural cycle of growth, but the laboured manipulations of Newcomb's process seem to suggest a decided un-naturalness to the process, too, maybe taking into account the science of convenience involving conception and delivery that's encroaching on the simple birds-and-bees old-fashioned way. But I don't want to say too much about it; just look for yourself and draw your own conclusions. And try to get there before the, um, harvest in October.

Other good reasons to stop at KWAG: Gwen MacGregor's Research, Data and Flow Charts, a response to her earlier River Grand Chronicles, and A Nervous Decade, a 10-year survey of the paintings of John Kissick.

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[Goncalo]

Mary Catherine is writing about Product of Eden on a devoted blog: http://productofeden.wordpress.com/