Repetition

I was recently thinking about the nature of repetition within art.

I am currently casting multiple identical cupcakes. Other artworks with multiple 'copies' have been:

Anthony Gormley's 'Field' series:




And Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower seeds':
This last photo is one I took at the Tate this summer, of Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seed installation in the turbine hall.

Although their themes differ somewhat from mine, I feel there are similarities with the ideas and the method in which I want to display my work. Like Weiwei's my work will all look identical (although they are not), whereas Gormley's differ more significantly.

By making lots of identical cupcake pieces, I want to play on the cupcake culture and the way that cupcakes have become such a big part of society, it's a strange phenomena really, the way that people try to make lots of perfectly identical cupcakes, adorned with an excessive amount of decoration.

This seems to me to have similarities to the work of Weiwei, where he plays on the idea of 'made in china', as though his seeds look identical, they are all handmade and therefore are not. Nothing is really ever identical, yet we try to make series' of identical things.

Gormley's work too, although each figure is different, their identities are lots in the vast sea of figures. This makes me think of the way cupcakes have become popular and everyone has to have them. By following the trend, everyone becomes the same. Their identities lost.

My cupcakes will be like a sea of people who are all indulging in the same thing, whilst also being almost perfectly identical revered objects.