Vegetables as art in new photography exhibition

A PHOTOGRAPHY exhibition featuring vegetables reimagined as playful characters will be on display in Queenscliff this month.

Sydney-based artist Marie-Hélène Clauzon’s photographs present everyday vegetables arranged as human-like figures, including leeks posed as dancers, capsicum as knights and broad beans as lovers.

The images draw on her background in food styling and photography, offering an alternative approach to traditional food imagery.

Clauzon is a French-Australian artist who studied art in London and photography in Sydney. She has spent 25 years working as a food stylist for major publications, with her work also featured in leading design magazines.

The body of work evolved while Clauzon was living in France during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was cooking, and I was just using a garlic head, and I had just taken the cloves out, and I was holding this garlic head and I thought ‘My God, that looks so beautiful – it looks like a flower’,” she said.

She took a photograph and the project quickly developed from there.

“It was just trying to picture vegetables, but in a different way to give them a different soul…to make them alive and show them in a totally unexpected way,” Clauzon said.

Clauzon often sources produce from local markets, particularly organic vegetables with unusual shapes, or what she describes as “personality”.

“It’s like having a piece of a puzzle. You start with one piece and then you add another one. You don’t exactly know what the next piece is going to be, but you build something little by little,” she said.

Her work recently gained national attention when her “dancing leeks” photograph appeared on the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine.

Clauzon said her coming Queenscliff exhibition, which will open at the Old School Hall in Learmonth Street on January 7, was suitable for both adults and children and encouraged visitors to spend time engaging with the images.

“Adults say [the vegetable series] awakens the child within,” she said. “I think this is what I want to give to people – just see things differently.”

The free exhibition, titled A Visual Feast, will run from Wednesday, January 7 until January 14. It will be open daily between 11am and 5pm, with an exhibition launch event to be held on January 7 from 5pm.