The sexual nature of fruits and their associations with male and female body parts and carriage of cultural meanings fascinate the artist: “Fruit’s short life points to human cycles sped up; the mystery of seeding, the beauty of flowering, the patience of ripening, the rapture of a pinnacle, the ever- changing…”

In Memory of Big Mike is a large-scale photo-homage to the world’s most consumed and popular fruit. The Big Mike banana was the most commercially produced variety in the world until supplanted in the sixties by the less flavourful Cavendish when fungal infections felled Big Mike.

Edible bananas are a genetic accident, seedless and sterile and dependant on cloning; hence the fragility through lack of diversity and the ongoing frantic research to ‘save the banana’.

In Memory of Big Mike, is a simulation created from a mix of natural ingredients cast from a banana peel mould. A fruit that is perishable by nature, it lies sluggish on a slab of marble, the material of mortuaries and memorials. The artist’s image is sectioned. In Victorian times bananas were sold and served cut-up as when whole were deemed unsuitable for Victorian ladies’ sensibilities. Panel #1 is a full-blown flower, an integral part of the life cycle of fruit and plants and art-historically favoured in Vanitas still-life paintings for reminding us that in life is death. That sentiment is repeated in a later panel.

Artist Biography

Svetlana Bailey’s practice searches for new ways of inhabiting our world and examines personal, political and philosophical relationships between humans and the natural environment. The artist places combinations of fruit and her own body in this picture as she explores the interdependence between human and habitat and the subject/object dynamic that misinterprets the underlying nature of these relations. Her work opens to questions on the role for humans within global ecology and speculates on the weirdness of the future.

Bailey is currently an artist-in-residence at the ISCP in New York, and she has previously been in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Marble House Vermont, the Mountain School in Los Angeles, the Vermont Studio Center, the NARS Foundation in New York and the Three Shadows Photography Arts Center in Beijing. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Australia and in China, including at Elizabeth Houston Gallery NYC, Clamp Art NYC and Blue Sky in Portland. She is the recipient of national and international grants by the Australia Council for the Arts, Copyright Agency Sydney, Joseph Robert Foundation Pennsylvania and the American-Australian Association in New York, and was recently profiled in Vault Magazine and PDN Magazine.

Bailey’s work is held in the Australian Government’s Artbank collection and the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and for two years running was awarded the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward prize. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and lives with her family in New York City.