In the course of roughly a year 50 randomly chosen people were asked to list all the foods/drinks that they would rather not be served at a dinner party. Homely poisons, presents their responses in a collection of 50 sheets printed letter-press with each list typed in. Although the only personal detail indicated is the gender, one gains a picture of each through their intimate dislikes. Homely Poisons reads like a novel, plotless yet with 50 characters seemingly more real than if for instance their names, addresses, age, measurements, etc. were listed. The starting-point for this work was threefold : first it aimed to show that a truer image is possibly given when the subject is defined by what he/she is not. This first governing principle was borrowed from a drawing technique for objects in space, requiring that rather than the object itself, the void surrounding it be drawn instead. By listing the foods/drinks that each person would reject, the edges are drawn, and the reader reacts on a very emotional level giving instant life to the sketched character. A lot is to be found in this primary material, the common dislikes, the varying levels of specificity, the varying length of each list, etc. The second idea was an advice found in an early twentieth-century manual of advice for housewives to keep a detailed account of the menus served to what guests, and the perceived reactions to each dish, in order to strive for perfection as a dinner-party giver. The artist was also playing with the requirement of summing oneself up into a collection of numbers and words through repeated form-filling as a start-up for any dealing with public bodies or private corporations and the necessity to ensure that human elements always burst the seams of any mechanically laid-out questionnaire.