Collection of slices of bread with images of naked women burned into the surface, displayed on small stands mounted on a white wall.

A piece of toasted bread with a naked woman burnt into the surface, displayed on a metallic stand.

Close-up of a slice of bread with a naked woman burned onto it, displayed on a transparent stand against a white textured wall.

A slice of bread with a naked woman burned into it, resting on a metal display stand.

A piece of toasted bread with a naked woman burned onto it, placed on a metal display stand.

An art installation featuring a row of small pieces of bread, displayed on a white wall. In the center, there's a small shelf with a wrapped package and a decorative item. Behind the plaques, there's a sign that reads "Plumper" with colorful dots.

Plumper Bread

Mia Johnson

2025 | laser-engraved Wonder Bread, screenprint, found object

I gave my partner a vintage BBW magazine for his 25th birthday the summer after I finished my MFA.
What started as a gag gift became a study on consumption. What does it mean to consume VS be consumed?

Fat porn and the people who enjoy it are seen as "kinky" and cast off as fetishists. The category itself, "BBW," marks the content as other. In contrast, the sexualization of thin bodies is rarely seen as fetish, it’s just “normal.” This reveals a cultural double standard, where thinness is equated with control, discipline, even virtue, while fatness becomes symbolic of excess, indulgence, and moral failure.

The magazine series that inspired this piece, "PLUMPERS & Big Women", brought me to concepts of over-indulgence, excess, and the sinful desire for more. Women's appetites, whether for food or for sex, are to be moderated, if not outright suppressed. To eat too much, to want too much, to take up space- these are read not only as personal flaws, but as moral ones.

Wonder Bread, an American white sandwich loaf consisting of 20 perfect slices in a cheerful plastic bag became the backdrop of my plumpers and big women. White bread, a nutritionally void, culturally "bad" carbohydrate, plays the role of visual and symbolic base. It mirrors the way we moralize consumption- empty, excessive, and shameful. In this way, the pairing becomes a recursive loop- fetish porn on fetish food.