Animal Forms in John Decker’s Consumption Series

February 25, 2026 Gavin Coates

John Decker’s 2025 works Consumption (On Pink), Consumption 2, and Consumption 3 form a tightly focused examination of consumption as both biological fact and cultural system.

John Decker is a printmaker whose mixed-media works combine relief, intaglio, and collage to examine consumption, systems of use, and the commodification of living bodies.

Working through relief, intaglio, foul bite, push engraving, and chine collé, Decker constructs layered images that merge animal anatomy, industrial symbolism, and historical print language. The small scale of the works intensifies their impact, encouraging close viewing and reinforcing the sense of inspection and extraction embedded in their imagery.

Consumption (On Pink), John Decker, 2025, mixed media, 2 x 2 in. / 5.08 x 5.08 cm.

Consumption (On Pink) presents a pig rendered in stark profile beneath a red, semi-circular form that reads simultaneously as sun, weight, or looming presence. The pig, an enduring symbol of consumption, agriculture, and appetite, is printed with tactile density through relief and intaglio processes. The pink ground softens the composition visually while complicating its meaning, introducing associations with flesh, vulnerability, and commodification. The layered printing methods create surface tension, emphasizing how the body becomes an object subjected to pressure, marking, and use.

Consumption 2, John Decker, 2025, mixed media, 5.5 x 3 in. / 13.97 x 7.62 cm.

In Consumption 2, Decker shifts toward a more overtly symbolic construction. A rooster-like figure rises through a geometric framework, combining organic anatomy with architectural containment. Split-fountain inking introduces subtle color transitions, while transparent red intaglio overlays suggest internal systems, circulation, warning, or exposure. The figure appears suspended between vitality and constraint, its identity fragmented by process and structure. The work evokes industrial logic imposed onto living forms, where growth and function are regulated, measured, and consumed.

Consumption 3, John Decker, 2025, mixed media, 4 x 4 in. / 10.16 x 10.16 cm.

Consumption 3 expands the conceptual field through collage-like layering and spatial overlap. The image of a cow appears dissected and licked, marked with fragments of text and overprinted color fields. The chine collé integration embeds the relief print directly into the intaglio process, collapsing boundaries between image and substrate. The composition reads as a diagram of extraction, bodies segmented, labeled, and repurposed. The underlying chaos of color and texture contrasts with the clarity of the animal forms, reinforcing tension between organic life and systemic consumption.

Together, these three works articulate consumption as a recurring structure rather than a singular act. Decker’s animals are not illustrative symbols but carriers of historical, industrial, and economic weight. Through complex print processes and layered imagery, he exposes how bodies, animal and, by extension, human, are inscribed, divided, and circulated within systems of use. The unifying theme is dissection: visual, material, and conceptual, revealing consumption as an ongoing condition embedded in both production and perception.

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