Jenny Parkin

Artist statement

Most recently, Jenny Parkin has been using architectural figures and cheap party food - custard, jelly, doughnuts, etc - to create little stage sets for her camera around themes of greed and consumption.

In other work she has recycled and remade things that are already out there in people's homes and lives. She considers the history of ordinary objects and how they have been loved and looked after, sometimes for decades.

Of the Gainsboro series, Royal College of Art curator Susannah Worth wrote:

"Jenny Parkin’s 'Gainsboro' series is a sticky, decadent display. Lashings of whipped cream are daubed explosively around blue and white porcelain figurines, sprinkled with ‘hundred and thousands’, glacé cherries and oozing pools of strawberry syrup.

"The images conflate the gratuitous abundance of a Knickerbocker Glory with an antique depiction of drunken flirtation, symbols respectively of greedy modern western society and an equally frivolous 18th-century aristocracy, as implied by the title’s art historical reference and the style of the figurines. ‘Twas ever thus, these images seem to suggest.

"The abbreviation in the title – a kind of ‘Gainsborough lite’ – reads as a nod to the brands and advertisements that employ such slick imagery to greatest and glibbest effect. In evoking the language of consumption, Parkin draws parallels between the extremes of wealth disparity in the 18th century, and the aspiration and greed that advertising fuels in our own modern-day capitalist society."