Monica Dritschel

Monica Dritschel has engineered bread into a dress, fashioning a complete and complex garment with incredible attention to detail and texture.

"The aim of my work is to skew the role of food. I transform its function from an essential substance ingested to sustain life into an object which envelopes the body. A fundamental food staple is a bread. It has symbolic significance in religion and literature; it engages our visual, tactile and olfactory senses. I use ordinary white sliced bread to create a garment, thereby communicating the complex issues surround the effect of food on one’s body. By, transforming an everyday staple into a fur-like coat disrupts one’s common preconceptions of what one commonly consumes. To warp the function of food. Instead of being viewed essential for life food now becomes a material which envelopes the body. Bread is used to create a garment that establishes a new relationship between the internal and external self. Perceiving dough as a 'clay' expands the boundaries between cooking and contemporary art. The manipulation of this material into a fur-like surface causes disruption of common preconceptions, making one deeply reflect on the role of this common staple." Monica Dritschel