Benson Campus Galleries | Greenville Technical College

Fixins' is a visual feast of remembered down-home family dinners. The Fixins' for this family feast include memories of beloved, homemade foods, memories of the folks themselves, and a retelling of their wise stories and yarns. Fixins' contrasts Amber Eckersley's large scale, abstract, and elegant photographs of food or food containers with Logan Woodle's usable, but hardly practical, sculptural food preparation utensils.

Amber Eckersley's "Leftovers" series are large scale, stylized photographs of food scraps or well-used food containers centrally placed on a fabric background. Each of her familiar objects are recorded as flat shapes offering the opportunity to rethink these objects as abstractions and also remember our own personal encounters with green bean ends, corn cobs, or a well-used muffin pan. She honors the memories conjured by these objects by presenting them out of context as worthy, formal, elegant abstractions. She states, "This world represented, this life, is dynamic and has a depth far beyond the quaint nostalgia associated with the South."

Logan Woodle has sculpted precious copper, brass, sterling, and even gold into elegant food prep utensils for making or presenting "low on the hog" foods that recount the wise and kindly stories of his grandfather's courageous, hard scrabble farm life. Woodle remembers hog's headcheese, chitlins, and biscuits as sustenance but also as particular treats or rewards. According to Woodle, "Through it all, stories told over meals taught lessons, brought hope, and gave people permission to laugh" and were served as fixins' with dinner.

Both Eckersley and Woodle mention the South as a particular archive of memories provided by families sharing food and stories. Personal memories inspired by food and family is correctly attributed to the South but is probably also a universal attribute of any culture that honors family and food, valuing the memories of both as an archive of the culture's traditions.

Both Eckersley and Woodle were reared in Conway, SC. Though only a river separated their respective family's homeplaces, their singular paths never crossed growing up. Eckersley holds a BA in history from Coastal Carolina University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Clemson University. She is currently the Lead Instructor of Photography at Greenville Technical College. She lives in Central, SC. Woodle holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Winthrop University and an MFA from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Coastal Carolina University teaching 3D Design, Small Metals, and Sculpture 1. He lives with his wife and children in Conway, SC.

In the fall of 2018, Fixins' was hosted by the Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum in Seneca, SC; Shelby Henderson, Director.