The Big Cheese

2004

This piece is about the search for the image you have in your mind. 

The effort in this is not even close to immediately obvious. The pillow is hand-sewn, the plinth self-built, and the piece of cheese carefully selected from an afternoon of trailing from high street Marks and Spencers, Waitrose and Tesco, to slightly less high street Harrod, Harvey Nichols and Fort and Masons. Finally the perfect, cartoon-esque wedge of gouda was found in Paxton and Whitfield Cheesemongers on Jermyn Street. Over 200 years of cheese making experience lead me to this excellent wedge of creamy yellow goodness. 

It was the closest thing to a perfect representation to the image in my head that I could find, although the show was a continuous labour of swapping the perfect cheese with its body double to keep both from sweating or melting under the studio lights. 

It’s a perfect wedge of cheese on a red velvet pillow. Worth it all at the end of the day.