Halfway Point
Group Show
C3 Studios, Rotterdam
Couples
Cutlery
Couples Cutlery began as a series of pen and oil pastel drawings depicting knives and forks tangled together as couples and lovers: twisting, melting, spooning, and intertwining. Familiar domestic objects slipping away from their intended function and into something emotional, bodily, and absurdly human. I became interested in the irony of these highly functional design objects relying on each other, becoming a sort of romance, as I, the user, picks and chooses favourite pairs, for silly reasons.
The kitchen itself became an important setting within the work. It is a space built to sustain domestic life and keep routines in motion, filled with smaller contained environments inside cupboards, jars, drawers, and cabinets. I was drawn to the cutlery drawer, a compartmentalised world of grouped and separated objects. There was something funny in imagining the drawer closing and the cutlery beginning their own secret domestic lives filled with relationships, affairs, tensions, and dependencies.
These drawings evolved into a large-scale textile installation consisting of four oversized wearable cutlery couples. These soft sculptural sleeves, the knife and fork forms extend directly from the body, becoming long, winding appendages that reach for and interact with one another. The work was activated through a series of photos inside a oversized kitchen set, complete with a giant plate at its centre. Colourful, playful, and slightly theatrical, the installation transforms the kitchen into a surreal performance space part domestic environment, part game.
By enlarging and softening rigid metal objects traditionally associated with labour and utility, Couples Cutlery reflects on intimacy, co-dependence, and the gendered dynamics embedded within domestic spaces. The work uses textiles, humour, and performance to explore care, emotional attachment, and the hidden narratives carried within everyday objects.
