History is always simmering beneath us, spicing the present. The potency of the past is absorbed into everything of today, but prevalent historical discourse often attempts to control the past and manipulate context, trying to obscure it, re-imagining it to become myth meant to inform the box that is designated “the past.” But as much as we try to cover the historical past, historical encounters and exchanges, history always emerges through, soaking through everything in its path of time passed, reaching the present.

 

            This series of drawings depicts the long-term affects of historical interactions by manipulation of cooking oil and curry spices to enumerate historical interactions, and through layering to obscure and redefine those interactions, in a process that allows the layers to ultimately reveal the intricacies, both good and bad, from beneath.

 

            Spices possess potent sensory experiences that pulled so many civilizations together via the Spice Trade, while also establishing unique cultural identities through cuisine. Oil is a carrier and lubricant that is necessary for both cooking and the functioning of an industrial society. The movement of oil becomes a necessary but potentially toxic mix and becomes a volatile but necessary carrier for culture.

           

            Oil resistant paper becomes the matrix upon which spice and oil interact, like time or a map of the physical globe that remains constant. Oil, spice, and paper become the actors for distribution, veiling, absorption, and reinterpretation upon that globe. Oil and spice embody cultural interactions and transfers that are covered by oil-absorbent paper but nevertheless soak through to spice everything thereafter.