Madeleine Sinnock

In Comfort ⇄ Control, plastic serves as a metaphor for femininity—alluring yet harmful, convenient yet dangerous. The work explores how a process of toxic consumption occurs both in our relationship with plastic, as well as in internalized values around gender. In this large collage made entirely of melted plastic, carefully collected shopping bags, rain ponchos, and food packaging warp and disfigure cutesy cartoons, sweet images of fecund fruit and flowers, bright, fun colors, and attention-grabbing words. The title refers to how comfort is often equated with being in control, while discomfort feels overwhelming or out of control. 

Widespread plastic consumption and the corporation-created need for disposability can make us feel trapped in a powerful matrix that makes the world, and our experience in it, actively harmful. Likewise, internalizing a set of gendered values that rewards you for making yourself more consumable further entrenches you in a system that benefits from your oppression. The work grapples with this relationship between comfort, familiarity, and economic reward; and the control, complicity, and cruelty inherent to a capitalist-driven existence. My practice imagines a radical discomfort around gender performance that disrupts the circular equation of comfort and control, and instead seeks agency in gender dis/comfort.