Chompers, False Idols, & Jesters.

ORDER #003

x1 THE ARTIST'S SPECIAL

YOU ARE BEING SERVED BY: Jaye

“One Banana Split please.”

I handed the menu back to the lovely Miss Maraschino. Her nails matched her hair; cherry red, glossy, but sharp enough to slice through a receipt roll. She scribbled my order down with a bedazzled pen.

“Comin’ right up darl-ink.” she winked, then made her way to the kitchen counter.

I set my notebook on the table and fished for a pen in my bag. The table’s laminate shimmered slightly, like it was trying to reflect something deeper than just the ceiling lights. That happens sometimes at Jink’s; surfaces get slippery with memory, like they’re holding more stories than they can keep down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my practice lately; where I am, where I’m headed. I don’t have a roadmap, but I figured it’d do me good to step outside the studio and sit somewhere with a strange kind of quiet. I’ve been a regular at Jink’s for years. The food here’s great. Spectacular, even. But that’s not really why I come here.

A moment later, between what felt like infinite and multiplying objects in my bag, I felt the chameleon-shaped top of my pen. I pulled it out, cracked open the spine of my notebook, and began structuring my thoughts:

At the core of my practice is a celebration of humanity’s innate and universal urge to personalize their world; embedding objects, spaces, and bodies with touches that reflect individuality and meaning. Not just for their visual impact, but for their emotional and cultural resonance.

Jewellery, piercings, and tattoos are recurring elements in my work. These adornments are inspired by my Libyan heritage: jewellery being an integral part of the culture and face tattoos rooted in North African traditions, particularly among women. Beautiful, permanent, and defiant.

My work is also shaped by the alternate worlds of video games and toys. Even as a kid, I appreciated these creations as more than just “fun distractions”. I saw intention. I saw design. I saw art. Be it selecting a character to play as in a video game, or picking out a specific character at a toy shop, I loved that each figure existed within its own universe, with lore, context, and a visual narrative that invited my imagination to run wild. These experiences introduced me to the thrill of fictional identity, aesthetic transformation, and the power of visual storytelling; concepts that would eventually become central to my artistic practice.

This fixation in personal aesthetics fuels my broader commitment to ornamentation and maximalism. My work is layered, abundant, and unapologetically expressive. Through dense detail, texture, and material excess, I embrace maximalist strategies not only as visual choices but as conceptual statements. My use of colour, pattern, and layering mirrors the complexity of cultural and individual identities, resisting minimalism’s impulse to reduce and flatten. Through this lens, ornamentation becomes a form of resistance: a way to assert presence, agency, and specificity in a world that often demands we shrink.

My love for fictional personas has recently evolved into a deeper engagement with how identity is constructed, performed, and consumed. I see striking parallels between toys, video game avatars, and the curated personas people present online. I believe that social media platforms (now, more than ever) function as digital arenas for character creation, where people build, refine, and perform versions of themselves in highly stylized ways. These performances exist within a system that encourages, and often rewards, commodification.

I’m particularly interested in the way aesthetic trends on social media become templates, shaping how people represent themselves visually. Styles like “Dark Academia”, “Coquette”, “Cottagecore”, and “Y2K” are not just superficial trends, they function as marketable identities: neatly packaged and ready to be monetized. While I don’t necessarily view these expressions as inherently negative or disingenuous (I sometimes participate because it can genuinely be fun), I’m aware of the broader implications —

“Banana Split!”

Miss Maraschino beamed as she stood holding the plate up high in one hand, the other on her hip.

“Just there is fine.” I said, motioning to the spot opposite me on the table.

“Don’t leave it too long now, or it’ll melt away and you’ll be left with a banana and sprinkle soup.” she warned with a smile, eyes trailing to my notebook.

“Understood.” I smiled back, and suddenly the dessert was on a timer that could detonate shame.

She gave a final approving nod and returned behind the diner counter, where she resumed her post like a wax figure.

I stared at the dessert for a moment; its gleaming, bright red cherry and cartoon swirl of cream. Cold air lifted from it in delicate waves, ghosting along my skin. I straightened with a shudder, then glanced down at my notebook, wondering if my thoughts had gone cold too.

Where was I?

Right. Marketable personas.

Digital aesthetics signal a mood, a fantasy, or a longing for belonging. They can empower expression, but they can also restrict it. The aesthetics that have emerged in recent years have become increasingly absurd. Unlike the more fantastical or nostalgic trends, newer trends such as “Clean Girl”, “Mob Wife”, “Old Money”, and “Pink Pilates Princess” are loaded with implications about class, gender, and desirability. They don’t just suggest a vibe, they prescribe a way to be.

In a world driven by consumerism, women and girls aren’t just marketed to — they are the market. Marketing is engineered around their tastes, fears, and desires. These visual identities often traffic in aspirational imagery, quietly enforcing ideals about how women should behave, look, or exist in the world.

These can be playful in some contexts, but they also carry a cultural weight that deserves unpacking. But, as philosopher, icon, and occasional comedian Tayce once put it: “that’s a story for another day”. My point remains the same: the boundary between self-expression and branding is increasingly blurred, especially in a landscape where personal style and content creation are increasingly economically entangled.

Now, I want to clarify something before we go further: I’m not saying all online expression is inauthentic or performative. But I do believe a large portion of it is. And it’s that majority that fascinates me, and frustrates me, and keeps me making the work I make.

One of the final straws that pushed me to fully explore these ideas was noticing how female body parts were being spotlighted as standalone aesthetic categories. I was seeing entire posts dedicated to a specific jawline. A certain arm shape. A particular eyelid crease — if you know, you know.

Female appearance was being categorized into archetypes like “bunny”, “deer”, “fox”, or “cat pretty/beauty”. Over time, the language kept multiplying, growing more fragmented, more surreal, but somehow more restricting; terms like “witch beauty”, “angel beauty”, and “mermaid beauty”, entered the realm and —

“You’re going off track,” something whispered.

I jolted slightly in my seat, blinking at the ice-cream.

Right. Another time. I’ll talk about it another time.

Now, I’d like you to meet the CHOMPERS.

I’ve been building a fictional universe populated by a growing cast of characters representative of different facets of internet culture through the lens of consumerism and online performance. I call them Chompers.

Why the name?

• Because they just got back from [redacted] with a brand new set of teeth! (Well, veneers). There’s no way you can miss those pearly whites — they’ll make sure of it. (They didn’t pay all that money for you not to notice).

• Because Chompers chomp through whatever trend is thrown their way. Endlessly feeding. Never full.

Like Pac-Man, they’re caught in an algorithmic maze, unaware they’re trapped.

Some of them gain a large following among the Chompers and, in doing so, become known as FALSE IDOLS; representations of idolatry in the modern age. If they then do something wrong, undesirable, or embarrassing, they are transformed into JESTERS. Jesters represent my way of exploring the idea of being “cancelled”. This comes from my fascination with how the internet reacts to public figures who fall from grace and how they quickly become objects of ridicule and malevolent entertainment.

All of my characters are female, but their appearances are intentionally ambiguous; they have no clear age. Inspired by the phenomenon of “Instagram Face” — a homogenized look born from filters, cosmetic trends, and algorithmic preference — they all share an eerie resemblance. This face has become a kind of digital archetype: symmetrical, poreless, youthful, and vaguely uncanny. But more importantly: desirable and replicable.

In this universe, individuality becomes a curated illusion, and beauty is not just admired but branded, sold, and recycled across timelines and feeds. I use this visual repetition to comment on the erasure of difference within online beauty culture, where individuality is sacrificed in pursuit of viral legibility.

Chompers are mainly crafted from scrap materials like offcut wood, discarded surfaces, packaging — but primarily cardboard: a deliberate material choice that symbolizes disposability, product culture, and the way identities are flattened into consumer objects. Cardboard, as a medium, carries connotations of transience, mass production, and containment. By transforming it into bodies and personas, I give form to the idea that in today’s world, even the self can be boxed, branded, and sold.

Their appearances are marked by stylistic choices like sunburns, exaggerated contour, or over-accessorizing; attributes I employ to explore the interplay between beauty, wealth, discomfort, and performance. The sunburn, for example, becomes a multi-layered symbol: it suggests luxury (time spent on holiday), aesthetic damage (too much exposure), and social status (tanned skin as a marker of lifestyle). These details evoke the contradictions of how looking good often means enduring a certain level of harm — whether physical, emotional, or psychological.

I’m also interested in turning cardboard into glass. Not literally, I’m not an alchemist. Yet. What I am doing is combining resin with cardboard to achieve a glossy, glassy look. I like that, initially, the artwork's surface appears sturdy and sleek, but as you peer around the edges you are met with the hollow, ragged ridges of cardboard beneath, mirroring the contrast between curated digital personas and the reality behind them.

My work doesn’t assert a fixed stance. For now, it is merely observational. While some viewers might read it as satire, critique, romanticization, or parody, I see it more as documentation: a visual chronicle of a cultural moment defined by speed, spectacle, and contradiction. In the same way that classical paintings depicted the fashions, values, and concerns of their time, my work seeks to capture the nuances of 21st-century digital life, where selfhood is ever-shifting and identity is simultaneously intimate and marketable.

The questions I find myself asking now: What does it mean to be seen? Who gets to be desirable? How do trends shape our bodies, our behaviours, and our sense of self? And where is the line between choosing a persona and becoming a product?

My characters stand as both mirrors and masks, reflecting the conditions of our time while also challenging us to look beneath the surface. Like pop idols, perfectly melded toys, avatars, or mannequins, they hold our gaze, but always with a flicker of ambiguity.

I aim to leave a lasting mark by expanding the visual and thematic possibilities of contemporary portraiture. I want my characters to disrupt spaces, to be greedy, loved, hated, and sensationalized all at once — because that’s the kind of world we live in. I want to create work that doesn’t just reflect culture, but complicates it.

I twist my pen shut and close my notebook, shoving both back into the portal that is my bag.

I reel in my Banana Split, already starting to melt.

It’s a pretty dessert. Built to be admired first, then devoured. Sweet, excessive, and camera-ready. A little unstable. If you don’t consume it fast enough, it’ll collapse; toppings slip, cream sinks, and what you’re left with is a puddle of a once great performance. Still sugary, but harder to name, harder to sell.

That’s where I want to make work: somewhere between the cherry on top and the mess it melts into.

— END OF ORDER —

Subtotal: 3.33

Note: Loves sprinkles

© 2025 Jaye Ink. All rights reserved.