Playing with the Domestic Goddess

Jenny Lawson is a performance maker based in Leeds UK. Her work is concerned with food, femininity, domesticity, spectacle, popular culture, and the autobiographical. Her performance work, most recently conducted as part of her practice-led PhD research, investigates the notion of the ‘domestic goddess’ in popular culture. Through ethnographic explorations into contemporary food practices Jenny has engaged in a variety of food sites and phenomena including kitchens, restaurants, food festivals, cookery classes, television chefs and food media. Like many, Jenny is practicing food everyday, that is, she is making it, eating it and watching it. These ‘food practices’ are embedded in her experiential vocabulary and form part of her autobiography, her social and cultural landscape, and impact upon her relationships and identities as a woman, artist, researcher, daughter, lover, friend... It is these engagements with food that Jenny seeks to re-present in her artistic ‘food practice’ and in doing so to explore, question and critique these experiences from within.