‘The Luncheon’ is a large-scale photowork of a sculpture made from toilet tissue carefully moistened to intensify the colour. The still life arrangement of fruits and vegetables, eminently consumable but inedible, is a witty pastiche of a typical Dutch ‘Old Master’ painting, except that this time the artist is a woman and the material used is one that the academic tradition is unlikely to endorse. McCarthy stated in 2003: ‘Colour has no relation to the function of toilet-paper. It’s a tasteful consideration. As the ideas of abundance, excess, desire and consumption have historically been intrinsic to still-life painting, the similar associations of today’s toilet-papers enable it, as material-of-choice, to slip naturally into the traditional still-life mould’. ‘The Luncheon’ was the winner of the Allied Irish Bank (AIB) Award for 2001 and was donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art by AIB in 2002.