How many times have you looked at a work of art and thought “this looks like poop!” Student-artist Georgie Mattingley of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia has used this concept to her advantage. She has created several sculptures incorporating her own feces. Some of her artwork, featuring brightly colored excrement, will go on display at the Kingston Arts Center in Melbourne this month.
The main focus of the upcoming exhibition, “Life is Delicious,” is a series of resin spheres containing Mattingley’s own fecal matter, along with flowers, leaves and crystals. Mattingley claims that she has been curious about altering the color of her excrement since she was 13 years old. Now, she has taken matters into her own hands and explored the “beauty in the mundane process of eating and consuming in our everyday lives.”
As expected, Mattingley’s work caused controversy when Kingston Art Center announced the exhibition. The Kingston Council admitted that they did not know these specific pieces contained the student’s feces and underwent a series of meetings to decide whether or not the pieces would be shown.
As a result, Mattingley’s artwork will be included in the collection and the “Council hopes that the community will make up its own mind about the exhibition,” a member of the council said after the meetings. Mattingley’s self-described “poo-pieces” will be among 22 other pieces of her work. She commented that she is pleased that her full collection has been approved and looks forward to the feedback from viewers. She also said that with or without the controversy, the viewers “can make a personal decision on whether it’s vulgar or not.”
As featured on a Melbourne radio station last week, Mattingley explained that she lives with a group of housemates that were nice enough to allow her to use their shed in the backyard as her personal studio to create her art. Even though this series seems strange to some viewers, Mattingley does have a motive behind her artwork. “I’ve done everything I can to turn something so vulgar and repulsive into something so beautiful and spiritual,” she said.
All photos are copyrighted and are being published with the permission of the artist.