Cat Davison

Imperfection is all around us. In both humans and the natural world it produces diversity, and pushes us forward. Some say it is the truest form of creativity or self-expression. The last few months have seen me exploring ideas around embracing imperfection. I've been fascinated with spelling mistakes, editing mistakes and imperfections in the creative process. Ultimately, though, I was drawn to the imperfections in the food we eat, and the regulations surrounding the aesthetics of perfectly edible produce which is thrown away simply because it doesn't look good. This amounts to over 20% of food waste in the EU, and is a travesty for those who like their produce a little different... surely a wonky carrot is more interesting than a perfectly straight one? But with such laughably inane and unsophisticated subject matter it was difficult producing something philosophically and aesthetically profound. Herein lies the paradox - you can talk about wanting to celebrate ugliness, but you better damn well sure it looks good! I produced a book, an installation and a series of photographic explorations. With the book, pages within it acted like EU enforcers, determining what we saw on the following page. In my photography, I systematically took hundreds of pictures of the surface of an 'acceptable' and an 'unacceptable' apple to try to examine exactly where this difference in acceptability lay. My installation used 'perfect' digitally printed and 'imperfect' screen-printed text to examine the laws further.

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