Meat For The Gods (2025)

Meat for the Gods reimagines the classical banquet scene as an altar of quiet defiance. Five women recline in dim candlelight, their skin rendered with the rich chiaroscuro of Baroque devotion. The central figure meets the viewer’s gaze directly, a pomegranate, split, rotting, and bleeding black, resting in her hand. Around her, the others sleep or feign death, their bodies half-swallowed by crimson drapery and fruit turned to ash.

⤷ Cox reconstructs the mythic tableau: the feast, the sacrifice, the passive muse, into something deeply confrontational. The title itself collapses reverence into brutality, exposing the way women’s bodies have long been sanctified through consumption. The fruits and flesh blend in hue and texture until neither seems distinct; abundance decays into offering.

The woman at the centre, awake among the sleeping, embodies both rage and knowledge. Her expression refuses idealisation. She does not seduce or repent; she witnesses. The black liquid that drips from her mouth and hand echoes throughout The Damnation Project as a recurring symbol of contamination and reclamation—sin becoming self-ownership.

Meat for the Gods reads as both lament and rebellion: a painting about being made sacred against one’s will, about the quiet horror of beauty mistaken for consent. The heavy warmth of the lighting and the tenderness of the brushwork betray the violence of the concept. It’s a work that refuses to choose between the erotic and the horrific, because both are already entangled in the history it confronts.