EMILY PEACOCK: BABYCAKES

Babycakes, Emily Peacock’s second exhibition at Seven Sisters, inhabits an uneasy space where humor, grief, and everyday ritual collide. Set against soft, slightly nostalgic backdrops—velvety drapery and pastel surfaces that echo birthday parties, family photographs, and institutional waiting rooms—Peacock stages small, irreverent acts that test the limits of sentimentality. A middle finger presses into a frosted cake; an ashtray overflows with cigarettes and dead butterflies. Elsewhere, tufts of baby’s breath, a baby bird, and a tress of hair linger. In a nearby video, a marshmallow slowly burns. Each image unfolds as a vignette in which sweetness and sorrow exist in equal measure.

 

The exhibition’s title nods to Edward Ruscha’s wry conceptual vocabulary, where language slips easily between affection, irony, and cultural shorthand. Peacock shares a similar appetite for humor that undercuts itself. Her photographs linger in the unstable territory between impulse and restraint—moments when composure slips, and something slightly unruly appears.

 

Peacock’s work traces the seam between personal history and performance. Drawing on staged still life and photographic tableaux, she makes acts of care, celebration, and coping visible through a recurring cast of props—chattering teeth, wilting lilies, burning candles, cigarettes, and her own body. The scenes feel arranged yet unsettled, as if something has just happened or is about to.

 

Across the series, the images become small acts of creation and tenderness. As beauty arrives, complications follow: desire, embarrassment, exhaustion, humor, and disturbance. Peacock taunts sentiment—pressing, testing, letting it collapse. Her body, exposed, moves between confession and offering. What remains to be taken when everything has already been given? Vulnerability also appears in quieter gestures. Blisters on her son’s fingertips after climbing a rope remind us that effort and aspiration leave their marks. Things hurt for a moment, and then they heal.