“The King’s Feast”, is a body of work which might be described as a comic philosophical horror fiction, which uses images and text from a variety of historical sources, including paintings, objects, recipe books and archival images/texts, for the development of paintings, pastel drawings and writing. The King’s Feast is unfolded (from the preparations to the performance) presenting an ambiguous ‘fictional history’ of works, about the relation between image, illusion and power.

The King’s Feast uses the King’s table as a metaphor, composed of ‘dishes’ which simultaneously represent historical foodstuffes (e.g. blancmangier, hung beef, collops, battle pye, plum pudding (lit), a square pyramide containing fruits and sweetmeats, and all manner of tartes and other confections) and monumental forms (objects, technologies, designs), which display the King’s wealth, the ideals and riches of society, and economic structure.

These dishes or ‘forms’ of the table are those sources of energy, (mental and physical) which are seen to keep the engine of society turning, delighting and satisfying those fortunate enough to sit at the Table and enjoy the feast.

The beautified forms themselves conceal the harms that it took to produce them. The cutting of the (animal-vegetable-mineral) mind-body is simultaneously the cutting of the earth, the dissecting of lands, people, taking the ore, the gemstones, the tea and the spices. The image presented is one of opulence, grandeur, and suppressing the utilisation and subjugation of life upon which they are based.

The structure of the book, playing with metaphor/ambiguity in word and image, presents a transformation whereby it becomes apparent that the enactment of the feast is the unconscious attempt through civilisation to escape mortality (through competition, nation states, economic/cultural expansion, the production of the newest and most glittering forms), to avoid the void, the spectre of death rather than face it (working together), and thus becomes a move towards it.

Through word/image play we see that the King’s war (and appearance of disease, famine, destruction) is revealed to be a direct shadow/mirror to the feast, and has, though hidden, been, from the start, substantive in its constitution.

The sacrifice of the ‘other’, the earth, the human being, the animal, the land, the sea, for the sake of the feast, is ultimately the sacrifice of the King himself. There can be no ‘feast’, no taking, no pillaging without harm to the whole, of which each being is a part.