Snake in a cookie jar
(2023)
Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.
Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.
Toad on the Moon takes the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor as a point of departure: the false but persistent belief that a frog will remain in slowly heated water until it boils. The exhibition uses this fiction to consider how gradual deterioration can become normalised, and how adaptation can shift from a means of survival into a form of inertia.
The title draws on myths that locate the figure of a toad on the moon, where it appears in stories of transformation, immortality and escape. Between the warming water and the moon, the exhibition traces a tension between endurance and withdrawal, asking when adaptation becomes acceptance, and when escape might offer another way of responding to an increasingly uninhabitable present.