Luca Woudenberg

Potato Dialogue

A conversation between the body and the potato body. Exercise, dieting, losing weight, gaining weight, ageing, and dying—all these different states of our bodies are judged and condemned. How do you create a different perspective? Our bodies show traces of these changes; they are marked by our lives and reveal everything we have experienced and endured. Yet, we often see these as flaws, areas for improvement, and even shameful. By demonstrating these bodily states through abstract forms based on potatoes, I create a distance from the body to observe it in a different way.

The potato is a product that we shape, use, and process in various ways. Always adapted to our ideals, undervalued in its original form. In many ways, this corresponds to how people treat their bodies, as an ingredient or a tool to achieve their goals. The potato becomes mashed potatoes, puree, or croquettes, and our bodies become sports factories, beauty ideals, or reformed bodies.

The golden speckles, the interplay of colours, the blending of those colours, rich faded hues, and a soft velvet cushion on a bright white solid wood base. An accompanying audio track offers insight into the artist's thought process, each potato-like object a story to tell. A glorification of our insecurities.

These metaphorical forms arise from the shape of potatoes. I compare the way we look at our bodies to the gaze of an object, the way we look at imperfections, ideals, and ways of using them.

Metaphors are important to me in my artistry. They offer a layer of protection as they create a space between my vulnerability and the audience. I also believe it's important that more can be seen the longer you look and examine; I don't want to reveal everything at once. I deliberately choose skin tones as references to human bodies, burnt metals represent the ravages of time and other circumstances, and the way the work is presented sets a tone. Conscious choices have been made down to the last detail.

The work's design, the pedestal-based exhibition, glorifies it and befits the serious tone of its subject. The voyeuristic aspect of an exhibition of bodies and the deliberate exposure of insecurities could encourage the audience to reflect on their own bodies.