Grit & Gristle artist Nicola Tibbetts has organized a new group exhibition for the North Vancouver Arts Council. On until July 26th, it features her work along with that of Ying-Yeuh Chuang and Ben Lee. Sad Mag talked with her about her donut painting on the back of the Grit & Gristle issue and her love of food.

Sad Mag: I was introduced to your work when one of your paintings was on the back of Grit & Gristle. The painting has Honey Cruller and Vanilla Dip donuts positioned on a stage of sprinkles and is part of a series that reimagines The Marriage of Figaro using Tim Hortons’ donuts in the place of actors. Each donut was given a character from the opera based on its appearance, texture, taste, and popularity. It was a perfect note to close the food issue and I think readers would be interested to know where the idea for this series came from.

Nicola Tibbetts: I had been using food as my subject for a few years at that point and was looking to put the foods into a context instead of painting them into flat saturated colour fields. I was sitting in Tim Hortons in Halifax drinking a hot chocolate and I began thinking of ways to do this. I realized that Tim Hortons donuts were a perfect “food” to anthropomorphize and play with because of the variety of textures, colours, shapes, fillings, and associations people have with certain varieties.

I chose The Marriage of Figaro as my narrative because it’s a ridiculous and melodramatic opera, which exaggerates the absurdity of anthropomorphizing donuts. I liked that Tim Hortons donuts are the epitome of low quality food while opera is one of the most bourgeois and “high art” of art forms.

SM: I’ve been looking at your work and food is common to all your series. Could you give a little context to your interest in food? 

NT: I’ve been interested in food for a long time. It began with baking and moved on to cooking when I realized meals were more important than dessert. Growing up we would talk about food, recipes, and our family food history around the dinner table and my sisters and I have continued that into our conversations today.

I love to read books and watch movies about food as well; two of my favourite books are The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher and Charlemagne’s Tablecloth by Nicola Fletcher. My favourite food films are ‘Tampopo’ by Juzo Itami and ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’ by Peter Greenway. Because I lead a food-centric life that’s all I want to make art about. For now.

SM: Many of your paintings anthropomorphize food and I think the result is at once humorous and elegant. Do you find the use of humour to be a balancing act?

NT: Sometimes the humour in my work is evident from the very beginning like in The Marriage of Figaro series while other times it becomes apparent later. I often appropriate ideas from art history and tend to choose stories and images that I find entertaining and strange which then find their way into my work. For Progress of Love series I copied the backgrounds and took the titles of French Rococo painter Honore Frangonard and inserted my own food characters where he had painted a courting couple. The Rococo genre was a very romantic, playful, and often frivolous period in art history and I wanted to heighten and exaggerate those aspects when I made my works. I’m not laughing at my ideas as I’m making the work but I do sometimes chuckle during an artist talk when I realize how crazy I must sound.

SM: Some of your work explores performance and theatre as well as food. Do you see an inherent connection between them or is there something else you are wanting to evoke in bringing them together?

NT: I think of cooking and serving food as performative even within my home. The series The Feast is inspired by medieval feasts, which were extremely performative. Every dish served had a specific history and meaning. In the Progress of Love series I took this concept even further by making the foods themselves the characters.

SM: You, Ying-Yeuh Chuang, and Ben Lee all use food as inspiration in your practice. What was your intention behind the exhibit with works from you three artists?

NT: The three of us have been colleagues in the Studio Art department at Capilano University for the last few years until the program was cut in April. Oddly I didn’t realize until about a year ago that our processes’ were so similar. I was interested in bringing together three very different practices that were united by the use of everyday objects like food to make curious and unexpected artworks. And in your words from earlier they also balance humour and elegance in their work. Basically I just love both of their work!

SM: Most of the pieces you have at the exhibit are from The Feast series, which imagines a banquet from beginning to end—untouched ingredients to dirty dishes. Was there a reason you brought this series to the context of this particular exhibit?

NT: Of all my paintings The Feast series is most focused on food and this exhibition highlighted food as subject. I felt that the minimalist nature of much of Ben and Ying-Yueh’s work also contrasted nicely with the abundance and excess in The Feast paintings.

Extraordinary will be on until July 26, 2014 at CityScape Community Arts Space in North Vancouver. More information about the exhibition and artists.