Artist Allie Webb on Being Inspired at the Restaurant Table

Her work depicts sumptuous dining tableaux. But wait – is that a dead fly in the corner?

At a café, Allie Webb will furtively draw the profile of a fellow diner, jot down snippets of conversation and take home a stained napkin. You might find her at the supermarket filling her basket with lemons or melons to be arranged in a still life back at her studio.

The shapes and textures of food and the theatricality of dining are an obsession for the Sydney-based artist, who recognises the beauty in a tangle of spaghetti, the way fingers curl around a wine glass and how bodies lean into – or away from – each other. “It’s like watching a play,’’ says Webb, 38, whose latest exhibition at Sydney’s Olsen Gallery (18 September to 12 October) comprises a series of bold linocut works that portray the ritual of dining.

While her prints appear at first glance to be decorative, look closer and there are hints of decay – the odd cockroach or fly underlining the theme of memento mori, a Latin term to describe the inevitability of death. There may be a tilted candle with dripping wax, a knife placed at a sinister angle or simply items that Webb says “aren’t quite right together”.

Strongly influenced by Roman frescos, Cubism and Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, Webb also finds inspiration in 1950s cookbooks, in which the images are hyper-stylised to the point of being “almost grotesque”. She features food she finds both attractive and repulsive – an angular crab claw, the tentacle of an octopus, mushroom gills – and distils these shapes and patterns into their most graphic form. The high-contrast simplicity of her linocuts is deceptive. “You’ve got one shot at it,’’ she says of the painstaking print-making process.

Even if it’s not entirely understood, Webb's art allows for pure expression. But she still chuckles at the customer who wanted to buy a work depicting ripe figs – if she could just remove the dead fly.

Exhibited at: Olsen Gallery, Sydney

Studied at: Bachelor of Communication Design, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (2009); Edinburgh College of Arts (2008).