Princess XL (fountain #1), 2015
Silicon bronze
Princess XL (fountain #1) began as an action performed by a young boy playfully brandishing a large marrow picked fresh from the family vegetable garden. Though small, Eady’s garden provides food for his family. It is a social space where the sweat of labour and sharing and the discovery of knowledge are bound by dirt and the shit of quail and chickens.
Eady’s 2014 exhibition The Shit Gardener recontextualised the seemingly backyard banal into a symbolic playground. Princess XL (fountain #1) can be understood by tracing a line from ancient civilisations to early Modernism. For an early civilization the notion of fertility necessarily and shamelessly included sexual reproduction of both livestock and humankind, so fertility gods often sported a conspicuous phallus.
