Given the rich cultural associations of meat with death, eroticism and sacrifice, as well as the precise techniques of butchery, the commission for a butcher’s shop would have to be one of the most interesting propositions for any designer. By Dreamtime Australia Design, Victor Churchill’s new outlet in Woollahra ably takes up this opportunity and is a world away from the plastic parsley and styrofoam trays of the supermarket meat section. Located in a shopfront terrace that was previously a butcher, Victor Churchill is a theatrical celebration not only of meat, but also of the craft of butchery, which is centrally displayed behind glass, against a wall of stone and on butcher’s blocks of unparalleled beauty. Here customers can witness the transfiguration of the animal carcass through a precise labour of cuts - when it ends up as porterhouse steak, butler steak or New York strip we can easily forget that this was once the leg or shoulder of a sentient being.
Victor Churchill takes its visual cues from the marble slab of the morgue, the vitrine of the traditional museum, the hooks and belts of S & M clubs, and the rich materiality of nineteenth-century Parisian arcades. The most potent association is with seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings, where meat is a common inclusion with which to reinforce the theme of the vanity of human existence. Dutch painters chose subjects that were meaningful for their patrons, but they were equally interested in the material and tactile qualities of things and carefully highlighted details such as a bubble of blood or the sheen of fat against shadowy depths. There are displays in Victor Churchill that look as if they were drawn directly from this genre. Watching the butchers artfully compose their daily window display, it is evident that the overriding concerns are with painterly questions of balance, juxtaposition, arrangement and framing. Most reminiscent of oil painting is the chiaroscuro lighting used throughout the interior, which yields bright points of pink flesh dramatically contrasted with dark shadows and backdrops. The effect is intensified by exhibiting single items of meat behind glass with a great deal of space around each piece.