‘I want people to realise disabled people live in a very different world,” says Caroline Cardus. Her artwork, one of 30 being displayed in galleries across the UK on Saturday, depicts scenes from Britain’s decade of austerity – there is even a magic money tree – and asks viewers to consider the brutal impact those political decisions had on disabled people. So far, so conventional.
Except her medium is cake and the austerity scenes are made out of fondant icing. Cardus wanted to explore the tension created when the politics of people being too poor to eat is embodied in a frivolous foodstuff – let them eat cake writ large. During the show at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery, Cardus is going to give a “cake-pun filled rant” of an artist’s talk (a certain someone’s ambushing by a cake may feature) about the effect austerity has had on disabled people, heightening the absurdist sense of contrast even more. “I like humour in my work even if it’s dark humour – and this is going to be pretty dark,” she says.
