Dimensions: image: 307 x 305 mm support: 307 x 305 mm frame: 451 x 441 x 46 mm
Copyright: © David Shrigley | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: David Shrigley's photo, simply titled "Carrots," presents us with a field of prickly pear cacti and, well, a packet of carrots. Editor: It feels quietly subversive, almost melancholic. The bleak earth, the scattered cacti, and then this incongruous image of neatly packaged carrots. Curator: Shrigley often uses humor to poke at the absurdity of everyday life. The carrots, in this context, become a symbol of human intervention, of our desire to control nature. Editor: There's a tension here between the natural world and the manufactured, pre-packaged reality we often prefer. It's a commentary on consumerism and its alienation from the earth. Curator: I think it’s also funny because the carrots aren’t even real, they are just a representation. Editor: Exactly! It's a photograph of a packet, which is a metaphor for simulation, or, even worse, blatant false advertising. Curator: It makes you wonder about authenticity, doesn’t it? What is real anymore? Editor: And who defines what is real or valuable. Maybe the carrots are more real than we think. Curator: Maybe you are right! Editor: It makes us rethink our perception of the most common objects, doesn’t it?
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tate 5 months ago
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Carrots is a colour photograph of a group of cactus plants growing in a gravely area of desert. In the image foreground, a photograph of a bunch of carrots is positioned incongruously. The cactus plants are evenly spaced in the rocky ground, like vegetables planted in a vegetable patch or a field. Enhancing the notion of cultivation, the picture of carrots is, on close inspection, the front of a seed packet carefully propped at an equal distance between the two cactuses behind it. The carrots were photographed lying on grass, visible between their root ends at the bottom of the package and contrasting with the dry gravel from which the cactuses grow. The mono-form cactuses sprout baby cactuses or flowers, emphasising the notion of crops and harvesting evoked by the packet of carrot seed. Shrigley has commented that: ‘in the work Carrots there is a dichotomy between growing carrots, which is boring, and growing cacti, which are inedible.’ (Shrigley quoted in Scherf, p.36.)
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