...I’m fascinated by the life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France during the 1789 Revolution. I’m fascinated by the bubble of privilege she lived in at Le Chateaux de Versailles...a bubble filled with grand parties in the sprawling gardens of the chateaux, the epic fashion parades that showcased wildly expensive jewellery & gourmet banquets of food that are rumoured to have tickled every sensation. A fantastic depiction of her life appears in the 2006 film, starring Kirsten Dunst as the Queen. This photo was very much inspired by that film. In the photo, I layered images of an aristocratic woman in her grand European regalia, with a modern woman playing in a pond...both images beckoning to Marie Antoinette’s life in the gardens of Versailles & her ‘humbling’ peasant village. I layered these images behind & within the boundry of a multi-layered cake because there is this sense that, while she indulged in the pleasures her position in society afforded her, she was also, very much so, just a product of a system that she had little control or ability to change...quite simply, if she didn’t eat the cake...the system would have found someone else who would...and even after the Bourbon monarchy collapsed...Napoleon replaced the old French Aristocracy with a new one, whose descendants still today, enjoy wealth that in many ways, elevates their lifestyles to a level of privilege that mirrors the life of Marie Antionette. And so...here we are...trapped in our own multi-layered history...generation upon generation of cream sitting atop layers of pastry...echoing Marie’s famous words, “Let them eat cake...”