Louise Gridley, a third year BA art student at Sheffield Hallam University, has created a series of advertising images which concern chocolate, women, sex and the media. She designed this poster of herself posing next to a muscular male torso moulded in cooking chocolate (provided by Safeway) in order to “titillate and poke fun at the association between sex and chocolate,” she explains of her image which subverts traditional advertising codes “so that the woman, still a sex symbol, is in control of the redundant male figure made of chocolate. My work makes fun of the notion that ‘sex sells’,” says the twenty-two-year old artist. Unfortunately for her, Cadbury’s was not amused. It censored her posters, which appeared on two billboard hoardings in Sheffield, stating that they were displeased with the use of the strapline “How do you eat yours?” and considered it an infringement of copyright. As a response to Cadbury’s action, Gridley, who stands before her original poster here, painted the words “How do you censor yours?” across the blank space where her poster should have hung.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Sweet censorship'