White Lights

White Lights
2024
Hellmann's Mayonnaise jars, mayonnaise, light fittings

‘White Lights’, 2024 is composed of a number of near empty Hellman’s Mayonnaise jars that contained wired light fittings, these were affixed to the ceiling of an exhibition space. By wiring light fixtures directly into jars filled with mayonnaise, the translucent, white condiment becomes a hybrid organic and synthetic light diffuser.This creates a literal, glowing ‘white light’ that subverts standard commercial gallery lighting with shop bought commodities.

The sculpture series refers to certain mass-produced food and drink products that have found a second life as loaded visual symbols used within online memetic imagery.  ‘White Lights’ attempts to establish physically the unsettling discordant feeling often evoked memetic imagery online. Through the placement of a domestic light fitting within a container holding a perishable condiment, the context shifts from displaying a comforting staple to something deeply bizarre. The slimy residue left in the near-empty jars evokes disgust, highlighting the cold, clinical reality of ultra-processed ingredients when stripped of their marketing appeal. The work also alludes to the process of image making in an internet era, and how everything is filtered through an attention economy. How an image has to be immediately legible, and to illicit an immediate response to gain any traction. 

The work speaks to the ongoing importance online culture has in shaping public discourse and sentiments. A product like mayonnaise that a first seems fairly innocuous, has a far more complicated socio-political narrative surrounding it. One that divides generational, racial and national lines. Mayonnaise has often been positioned as a punchline within online discourse. Being repeatedly slandered due to it’s reported blandness, it being a symbol of corporate homogenisation and even described as “white person food”. This notion is synonymous with negative responses towards what’s considered British cuisine, mostly ridiculed by American audiences. The work explores how easily online subcultures can reconfigure consensus of commonplace products, shifting these supermarket basics into charged semiotic symbols.

‘White Lights’ was exhibited as part of ‘2012’, a group exhibition at Continuum in Bordeaux, France. The exhibition ran from 14th – 16th March 2024.