Gabby's research for best sculpture

"In her groundbreaking book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, feminist scholar Carol J. Adams points out that the connection between meat and masculinity goes far beyond typical sexist advertising.  Animals are commodified and sold in ways that feminize and sexualize their bodies.  Meat isn’t just manly, it’s sexy, literally.  To consume these animal’s bodies is to wield power – to dissect, ingest, and ravage female bodies.  Here, meat eating becomes a symbol, a tool, of patriarchy and oppression.  It is both a reflection of a culture that allows violence against women and a means through which to perpetuate it."

To read this article in it's glorious entirety

So I'm just gonna flip that to a nice grotesque manly sort of thing. 

Resin is beautiful. But it's also highly toxic and corrosive, when introduced to lesser plastics or meat the effects are disturbing. Let's look at the importance of that:

"Preservation of visual art objects created over the last hundred years has two main aspects. The first is the preservation of the various materials used and the second is the preservation of the intention and meaning of the work which, in most cases, extends beyond the material structure and may even lie outside it. While these points are basic considerations that come up whenever conservation work is to be carried out, obvious challenges are presented by works which use materials that are intentionally subject to processes of change in the near future or conceptual and performance works, the ephemeral nature of which throws into question the importance of the material. By purposefully introducing decay, the artist appears to emphasize the irreconcilable need to simultaneously maintain both the material dimension of the work and its conceptual dimension. If we disregard works such as sculptures made of sugar in the Baroque period, it is evident that food has increasingly been incorporated into artistic works since the 1960s – the idea of the accidental transformation processes, and the beauty created by them, being an integral component of the art. More than any other artist, Dieter Roth was interested in the characteristics of decaying substances."

That Tate article here