Leopold Bloom’s Breakfast of Kidneys SOLD

Leopold Bloom’s Breakfast of Kidneys – In a continuing series of an ongoing relationship with the ordinary and everyday, I have reached out to others for them to share with me the things that form their everyday.

These are the things that they might reach for in different times of the day yet do so automatically, without much thought.

For example, ‘Maldon Sea Salt’ goes on pretty much everything I eat which, when given further analysis, acts in some way as my maintained and physical connection to Europe – the salt from the sea is an essential part of my physicality.

‘Leopold Bloom’s Breakfast of Kidneys ’ – in this series I’m purposefully not sharing the identities of those that shared their sometimes very personal stories with me; and so, ‘Bloom’s Kidneys’ arose from the childhood of the person who shared this one.

Every Sunday they would go to their grandma’s house for Sunday roast and always emanating from the kitchen was the constant smell of cooked offal from the traditional Sunday breakfast that had been eaten earlier; “and it was as though the wood-chip wallpaper itself was being purposefully peeled back so more of the smell could be stored”.

The comparison with Joyce’s character, Leopold Bloom with “which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine”, was so acute that whenever this person heard the name ‘Bloom’ they would instantly smell the kitchen of their grandma – a post-war ‘nothing-gets-wasted’ woman from the working class inner-city housing estate of Hyson Green in Nottingham, England.

Synthetic Polymer on stretched canvas

61 cm (W) x 61 cm (H) x 3.5 cm (D)