
The cakes, and the photographs of them, are intended to draw on a variety of touchpoints. There are their specific references, of course, to the restraints, drugs, and psychological aftereffects of unwanted Cesareans, but the medium is also the message. The white-fondant-covered cakes partake of both the white-tablecloth celebration and the funeral, highlighting the distance that can divide those with direct experience of trauma from the world around them despite what appear to be shared rituals. Their smooth surface but imperfect contours are suggestive of the vulnerable and naked human body, and their ghostly pallor hints at the inner corpus exposed under harsh lights in surgery. In the act of baking and decorating the cakes, I made and remade that captive flesh, building it up and staring it down through the lens of my camera." -Jennifer McNichols