At the time of making Deck, Terence McCormack was reading the essays of the writer and activist Audre Lorde. He was working in a restaurant in London around the same period and would be drawn to the constantly changing dirty pool of dirty cutlery left in a square bowl in its kitchen for cleaning. Struck by how Lorde discusses an inherited sense of self-loathing commonly experienced among minorities of sexuality and race, McCormack found the ''front and back'' of the restaurant to be a prism through which to locate this inherited and external force. Here, the compulsory movement of paid work - of crossing inside and out, with it concomitant traces of refined ingestion and expulsion - became a way for McCormack to stare back at the ways in which ''minor'' subjectivities are forced into being through touching the combustible interiority of themselves (the blood and guts) and the discarded food and inedible leftovers of others. Recorded daily, the endless rotation of dirty forks, knives and spoons in pools of varying soapy waters serves as testimony of this inscription, and of how it might be written. As Lorde stated in her 1982 speech '' Learning from the '60's'' ''We must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other''. Excerpt from Divine Drudgery, 2021. 

In Terence McCormack's Deck, 'How to fill the void of unknowing ? To seek it out and depict it, contain it with a provisional structure, before despair crashes in', Kirstie Bell, The Unobservables, 2020