Location: Arthole, Darkroom, 336 Saint Asaph Street, Christchurch Central City, Christchurch 8011

Pig Tucker is a series of photographs and mixed media works, drawing on childhood memories and hometown images to articulate questions about truth and myth and fact and fiction and the interpretative gaps that remain. 

As she grew, the artist recalls her grandfather admonishing her against dining on pig tucker alone. Comics? Pig tucker. Magazines? Pig tucker. Novels? Pig tucker. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, but a headful of candy makes the mind rot. Better read an encyclopedia as well. 

More than twenty years later, Irenie How's last show with Photosynthesis revisits pig tucker as the lingua franca of our age. The works in this series proffer nuanced interpretations of the subject-object relationship through documentation of lived experiences, materiality, and truths juxtaposing commensal imaginative worlds, abstractions, and myths. Symbolic motifs and studied portraits sit between ad hoc cityscapes and poetic advertising texts, while gestural elements bring intuition into explicit form as an almanac about ordinary life. 

Overall, Pig Tucker invites the viewer to consider that the realistic and the fantastic are both essential eating.