For visual artist, Barbie Greenshields, food serves as the medium with which to explore and express ideas pertaining to the universal themes of identity, self, and the human condition.  Her practice employs the iconography of domestic culture and ritual that serves as a framework to explore the visual possibilities and connotations of food as materials in art.

Monuments to Moments – Celebratory Cakes, is Greenshields' first solo exhibition upon graduating from her Masters.  This exhibition of sculptural works is an iconographic monument to her ideas and themes. Multiple layers of association and meaning are deliciously and wittily folded into a narrative that draws on cultural and lived notions of time and memory.

Greenshields has taken the familiar, decorated celebratory cake as her point of reference to create a series of works that symbolize significant transitions within the Journey of Life.  She employs a process of de-construction in using the ingredients derived from the cake, as the materials for art making.  Each ingredient is married with a particular domestic object, becoming the surface on which the food is layered, akin to the icing being spread on the cake, but with a conscious referencing to the craft of the art making process.

Greenshields has taken each domestic item and layered the material over the surface of the object. A bath is coated with melted chocolate; a chair is encrusted with built up layers of sugar, patches of which have broken away and been re-layered; a cabinet is pasted with coats of a flour/glue mix, which, with the passage of time, has flaked and cracked; a single bed is covered in egg shells and an ironing board is caked with margarine. The layers transform the objects, paradoxically altering whilst drawing on associations to their domestic purpose.

Juxtaposed with the transfigured domestic objects, are the cakes themselves, made for Greenshields exhibition by a friend's aunt who practices the traditional Australian craft of Cake Decoration.  The cakes act as markers, identifying the different stages in a lifetime, setting up a dialogue with the objects, drawing on social and cultural occasions or moments that denote significant transitions in a life span. Revealed is a complex set of associations and metaphors, set within an unequivocally Australian suburban scape, that resonate and abound with allusions to the matter of life and death that permeates the human life span.

Greenshields invites us to draw on our shared memory and history, to look closer and discover deeper darker truths.

The ironing board caked with butter - the fat of the cake, evokes a disconcerting slippery surface, enhanced by the association of the iron and its functional use. Atop the ironing board, Greenshields has placed the key cake (21st birthday). The juxtaposition alludes to identification with independence and the hazardous aspects of this transitional phase in our lives, despite being in our prime, rich with the fat of life.

The idea that you stand at the ironing board to iron evokes the idea of standing at a crossroad in your life where new directions are possible; the cross of the ironing board legs, the implied action of the iron sliding somewhat uncontrollably in any direction across the greasy surface created by the margarine.  Greenshields cleverly evokes this association by positioning the cake as though it has skidded along the ironing board creating a wall of margarine to form on the adjacent side of the cake – a mini sculpture in itself ambiguously suggesting survival of this fraught transitional stage.

The objects work as containers also.  For example, the hand basin acts as a vessel for the milk – the only liquid ingredient in the cake recipe.  Greenshields has the cake sinking into the liquid, a slice of which rests uneaten on the side of the basin, the thirteen extinguished candles askew.

The passage of time is significant to this work and is alluded to by the curdling of the milk and the disintegration of the cake immersed in the liquid. Signified are the loss of childhood and the transition into adolescence by the (mothers) milk turning sour. I viewed this work on the third day and noticed that bubbles were starting to appear on the surface and immediately associated the protruding milky forms with pimples.  This was reinforced by the idea of the adolescent obsession with the complexion and how the milk in the basin through its fermentation was creating a skin on the surface of the liquid.  The function of the domestic object is apparent. It is the site where the face is washed and studied in detail for blemishes.

The bath coated in chocolate also functioned as a vessel for the body. Here ambiguous associations are staged with rituals of bathing, and conversely, bath as coffin. The chocolate appears to have been poured down the walls of the bath.  Layers built up and slumped suggest the build up of bodily fluids either from the dead or the living.  This is highlighted by a chocolate stained surface suggestively having oozed through the drain of the bath.  This evoked the idea of the body in decay, dissolving, returning to its fluid primeval origins.  The single piece of cake balanced on the edge of the bath signifying the last stage of the life cycle and the last piece in the installation.

Three other pieces complete the narrative and are juxtaposed with the remaining cakes. The single bed encrusted with egg shells conceals beneath it the New Born Baby Cake; the double seater lounge chair coated in white sugar, proudly displays the triple tiered Wedding Cake; and finally, the floured cabinet reveals within its mirrored interior, the 50th Anniversary Cake.  Each work is framed by a layer of salt applied directly to the floor's surface creating a contrasting effect between the works and the space, spotlighting the works and infusing the space with a theatrical atmosphere giving the works an ethereal quality.

Greenshields sculptures take on a life; the food surfaces are like and evocative of skins or bodily fluids, likening the sculptures to living organisms.  They take us beyond the cultural frame of reference so clearly indicated, and compel us to contemplate the simultaneously celebratory and morbid moments of our biological yearnings and fate.