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400asa t1_j9l5n20 wrote

Reply to comment by catriot in Daily Bread #12 "Kintsugi Toast", me, bread/resin/gold leaf, 2023 by catriot

I was asking just because I wanted to know more about your process, no judgmental intentions on my part. I'm using the phrase "cultural appropriation" very loosely, because I think it's usually ridiculous to accuse artists of that.

I was right on the money for the sacredness though! the love that's given to the subject carries through to the viewer very well. I mean, it's bread. It's not that hard to love bread. It's a powerful subject.

I'm glad to hear resin works well on toast. I was asking about that because I tried to encase perishables back in the nineties but I didn't have access to epoxy and stuff like that so whatever I tried didn't work too well...

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shadow_dreamer t1_j9nwsxq wrote

The most basic of foods. The staple of many cultures. A straight grain, ground to powder, reconstituted and baked into something new-- the shapes they take vary, from naan to piita to tortilla to brioche, the fiber they're made of varies, but again and again it arises.

Wars have been fought over it. Famines spring for the lack of it. We build our sandwiches, we start our days with toast.

What is bread, if not the embodiment of our hopes for the harvest? What is a slice of toast, but the collection of every hand that carried it to where it ends? Beginning like as a seed harvested from crop, tended with care if not love, by machine if not man, engineered over generations to grow larger and stronger than it ever would have alone, spread over more of the earth than nature ever would have carried it; cut low and given new life, ground down into something new to reach the ultimate of it's potential; mechanically cut by machines engineers spent hours putting together, years after the design was made by someone else; packaged in the reconstituted flesh of the ancients that has been processed into immortality and sent on it's way by the liquid form of more of the same. What is a piece of bread if not the result of every step to make it?

Bread is a holy thing. Just look at any harvest god.

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