A Handy Test for Doneness is a video and photography series by Christopher Reynolds that explores the visceral intersections between food, the body, and mortality. The work examines traditional methods of using one’s own hand to test the doneness of cooked meat, drawing attention to deeper themes of death, vulnerability, violence, and the construction of selfhood.

Referencing the language of anatomy, pornography, horror, and other pop-cultural signifiers, Reynolds highlights not only the biological processes of consumption but also the emotional and psychological dimensions of our relationship to food. By abstracting and recontextualizing this familiar culinary practice, A Handy Test for Doneness challenges viewers to confront their own embodied experience and complicity in systems of consumption.

Heavily influenced by Suzanne Lacy’s seminal performance Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976), Reynolds similarly blurs the boundary between subject and object, human and foodstuff. In doing so, he invites the audience to imagine themselves as the object of preparation and consumption, unsettling the perceived distance between the eater and the eaten.

Through this performative examination, Reynolds interrogates the social rituals that sanitize violence and death in food culture, exposing the uneasy emotional terrain that underlies acts of nourishment. A Handy Test for Doneness ultimately transforms an everyday gesture into a meditation on corporeality, power, and the fragile ties between life, pleasure, and mortality.