Morning Meat Up

« Morning Meat Up is a poetic photographic exploration of a spontaneous encounter inside Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market on a winter morning, while the city still lingered in sleep. Guided by intuition, camera, and an attraction to the unexpected, I entered a surreal theater of ritual, repetition, and quiet confrontation.The market’s cold cathedral of flesh revealed images I had not sought—yet could not ignore. Fluorescent lights hummed, knives struck in steady rhythm, and carcasses swayed in a disquieting choreography. The butchers moved with solemn grace—among them “The Godfather,” a former fighter turned butcher, cutting with reverence and precision. Conversations drifted like fragments of a dream; greetings felt ceremonial; meat shimmered like a form of edible nihilism.Influenced by G.I. Gurdjieff’s reflections on awareness and Kafka’s atmosphere of latent dread, the work examines how routine can conceal violence, and how consumption can obscure deeper truths.Over time, the photographs—paired with a written narrative—transformed from documentation into a visual poem.The project invites viewers to inhabit a threshold: between waking and dreaming, flesh and identity, survival and ritual. Here, meat becomes more than sustenance—it becomes metaphor, mirror, and myth.What does it mean to eat, to kill, to remember? »