The Offering, 2024

50″x25″

Oil Painting

“The Offering” is an exploration of bodily subjectivity, power, and consumption, drawing from Michel Foucault’s analysis in The Body and Its Sexual Being.

Foucault argues that the body is not merely a biological entity but one shaped, disciplined, and consumed within structures of power and desire. The body is both a subject-one that acts, desires, and expresses-and an object-one that is seen, categorized, and consumed by others.

As I engaged with these ideas, I found an unsettling parallel in a mundane act: cooking fish for a friend. In preparing the fish, I treated it with care-cleaning, seasoning, and presenting it as an offering. But once served, my focus shifted. I observed which parts were consumed, which were rejected, and what was left untouched on the plate. In that moment, I recognized a reflection of my own experience-of being shaped, adorned, and offered for consumption, only to see parts of my identity accepted while others were discarded.

This painting presents my body as a served dish-pampered, prepared, and dissected. Some parts have already been consumed, while the head, like the uneaten remnants of a meal, remains. It is an unwanted offering, rejected and left behind. This visualization resonates with Foucault’s dialectic of the subject-object: I exist both as the giver and the given, the one who offers and the one being consumed.

Through The Offering, I question the ways in which bodies-particularly female bodies-are shaped, presented, and ultimately judged through structures of power. What parts of ourselves are deemed desirable? What is left untouched?

And what does it mean to exist as both the server and the served?