La Femme de Cuisine Fatale (The Fatal Kitchen Woman) is a darkly comic sequence of drawings in which Kirkham turns the familiar domestic environment of the kitchen into a setting for eroticism, violence and bodily horror. The title, a play on femme fatale and the figure of the housewife, immediately establishes the series’ mixture of domesticity and menace.

The drawings unfold through a series of meticulously observed fragments. A woman’s hand disappears beneath clothing, fingers explore the body, and sexual encounters are presented with the same cool definition that Kirkham applies to cups, cutlery, vegetables and other objects of everyday life. The kitchen becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the body – food, flesh and sexual acts occupy the same visual territory, while knives and other utensils introduce the possibility of injury and death.

Kirkham’s humour is pitch-black. What initially appears to be a sequence of erotic encounters gradually becomes something more disturbing, with the domestic rituals of cooking transformed into metaphors for sexual appetite and physical consumption. Castration, cannibalisation and death all enter the imagery, but the drawings avoid the theatricality that might too easily accompany such subjects.

The final images extend the joke into something darker, with the remains of a meal laid out like the evidence of a crime. La Femme de Cuisine Fatale thus turns domestic life into a theatre of appetite, desire and violence, where cooking and eroticism become interchangeable.