Life relationships

This husband’s response to a rebuke for messiness was a work of art

Poke Staff. Updated March 3rd, 2025

It can be very frustrating to live with someone who has different standards of cleanliness than you do, such as if they leave the dishes until the morning, while you like to leave them until you hear your mother’s coming over and then put them in a box in the cupboard.

Back in 2019, Twitter/X user, Lizzie Swann, was becoming irritated by her husband Tomas’ habit of leaving empty wrappers lying around, so she asked him to stop. It didn’t quite go how she’d hoped.

And just in case that’s tricky to read …

‘Provocation’ (2019)

Tomas McAuley (b. 1983)

Mixed media: oatcake wrapper on marble

Part of the famed ‘Annoyes’ school of visual artists, McAuley’s works have long sought to shock and to disturb, but ultimately to deepen our collective understanding of the human condition.

This work probes the intersectional boundaries of art to question, with an urgency that echoes the uncertainty of our Zeitgeist, the limits of acceptability, culpability, and conceivability, using the translucency of everyday materials, transfigured in the purifying flame of creativity, to show, in a world marked by division, the fundamental elision of the artistic and the human.

The post went viral, with appreciative comments like these pouring in.

One Twitter user wanted to see him develop his art.

Which was lucky …

Someone tapped into their inner art critic.

Another tweeter suspected it was too close to the artistic zeitgeist for comfort.

We’re not sure how they’d deal with this in the divorce courts.

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Source Lizzie Swann Image Lizzie Swann