“Lactation Envy”: Who Does Milk Belong To? Irmak Dönmez’s Surreal Economies of the Body
Irmak Dönmez, Sirens Milk // Human Milk for Cows II, 2026. Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, luster. 55 × 17 × 22 cm.
On the surface of Irmak Dönmez’s milk cartons, breasts leak, shells open into fleshy cavities, and white droplets collect into streams. The bodily details crowd out the packaging, making it difficult to regard milk as an anonymous substance. Before it reaches a shelf, it comes from a living body. Dönmez keeps that body in view, bringing its fluids, desires and supposed obligations onto the surface of the product.
Her ongoing Milk series draws upon the reassuring imagery of dairy packaging (happy cows, green fields, an apparently effortless supply) while imagining increasingly unlikely sources for the milk inside. Male Milk, Semen/Seaman Milk, Sirens Milk, Milk Plants and Milk for Man-Children promise nourishment from male, queer, vegetal and mythological bodies. The names are funny, sometimes deliberately awkward. They also make the usual arrangement seem less obvious: certain bodies are expected to produce, and others are entitled to consume.
Dönmez began developing the series in Denmark nearly a decade ago and has since returned to it through sculpture and installation. In April 2026, the works occupied a wall in Martch Art Project’s booth at the fifth edition of Contemporary Istanbul Bloom. They will next be shown at the twelfth edition of Asia NOW, Paris Asian Art Fair, in October 2026.
Irmak Dönmez, Sirens Milk // Human Milk for Cows II, 2026. Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, luster. 55 × 17 × 22 cm.
Imagining the Source
In Sirens Milk, two mermaids appear on the side of a white milk carton, one bringing her mouth to the other’s breast. Their long hair and upper bodies are drawn in blue, while a sculpted, scale-covered tail curves down the carton and ends in a broad fin. On the adjoining face, a large pink shell opens around fleshy folds resembling vulval lips. Porous, coral-like clusters and pale green tendrils gather around it, extending across the glossy surface. A sculpted splash of white liquid rises from the spout. The familiar carton becomes a meeting place for bodies and marine growth, its flat surfaces interrupted by protruding forms that invite touch.
The writing on the carton extends this fictional world. The milk is described as coming from lovesick sirens; its production involves singing and orgasm. These extravagant claims turn the language of product information into an erotic narrative. A label conventionally expected to reassure the consumer about provenance instead introduces a source that cannot be verified or made biologically plausible.
Bodily forms occupy the very surface that would ordinarily mediate between production and consumption. Shells, coral-like clusters and a scaled tail project from the carton, interrupting its promise of a clean, manageable product. The body usually absent from dairy packaging becomes difficult to overlook. The encounter between the two mermaids brings nourishment and erotic intimacy into the same scene, unsettling familiar assumptions about which bodies can produce milk and whom they might nourish. Calling the work Sirens Milk gives this impossible substance the familiarity of a supermarket staple. Would we buy it? The carton lets us imagine a world in which milk comes from sirens, and their songs and pleasures belong on the label.
Irmak Dönmez, Mermaid’s Jouissance // Human Milk for Cows II, 2025. Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, luster, piercing.
30 × 20 × 12 cm.
Between Nourishment and Pleasure
A second wall-mounted sculpture develops the encounter between flesh and marine life. Porous, reef-like formations spread across a white rectangular support. At its centre, a shell cradles a breast with a metal piercing through the nipple. Smaller bodily fragments appear elsewhere among branching forms and pale green growths. The breast resembles a pearl lodged within an oyster, precious and exposed. The nipple piercing suggests a choice about how to adorn one’s own body. Read alongside the carton, it presents the breast as a source of nourishment, sensation and self-expression, raising questions about who determines its uses.
Through these invented products, Dönmez asks who is expected to nourish whom, whose bodily fluids may become commodities, and why certain forms of extraction are perceived as natural. The works draw attention to how the capacity to nourish becomes an expectation of care, reinforced by patriarchal ideas about motherhood. Yet the works resist becoming straightforward illustrations of feminist or vegan discourse. Their politics operate through humour, eroticism, exaggeration and surrealist world-building.
What If Lactation Were Envied?
Dönmez’s irreverent engagement with psychoanalysis centres on a provocative reversal. What if the capacity to lactate became the object of envy? Turning Freud’s “penis envy” into “lactation envy,” she shifts the terms of comparison. The body that produces milk becomes a source of coveted capacities, prompting us to ask who gets to define bodily difference as a deficiency in the first place. If one body is taken as the standard against which others are measured, its particular anatomy begins to look like the measure of human completeness. Dönmez’s reversal makes that choice of standard conspicuous and available for revision.
The question becomes more interesting when we consider what might actually be envied. Lactation involves the remarkable possibility of producing nourishment within one’s own body. It can establish an intimacy in which another person’s survival and comfort depend, at least temporarily, on that production. Someone might envy the capacity itself, the closeness it enables, or the significance of being needed in this way. “Lactation envy” opens these possibilities without settling on a single account of desire.
Dönmez’s fictional products hold these different meanings together. Milk is valuable enough to be named, packaged and offered for consumption, while the bodies imagined as its sources remain excessive and unruly. They have desires that cannot be neatly contained within the promise of nourishment. In Sirens Milk, the label attributes production to song and orgasm. This fantasy allows lactation to arise from the producer’s pleasure, giving the fluid an origin beyond someone else’s need. The sirens’ bodies produce because they feel, sing and enjoy.
This humour gives the series room to move between bodily politics and pleasure. Cartoon-like breasts, penises and milk-producing plants proliferate across its imagined products, loosening the familiar connections between anatomy, gender and function. Parts detach, migrate and acquire unexpected capacities. A breast can nourish, attract, adorn or produce something through pleasure; a plant can enter the fantasy of lactation. Through this excessive vocabulary, Dönmez imagines bodies with more possibilities than the roles assigned to them. “Lactation envy” becomes an invitation to reconsider what bodies can do, what others want from them, and how much of their capacity remains theirs to define.
The reversal also makes fun of the authority with which explanations of bodily difference are delivered. Dönmez openly embraces distortion as an artistic method. Her propositions arrive as fiction, fantasy and absurdity, inviting us to recognise how a speculative account of the body can sound persuasive simply because it has been given a name. “Lactation envy” borrows that explanatory confidence with a wink. Once the term is introduced, it becomes surprisingly easy to imagine a whole account of psychic life around it. Her reversal is therefore most productive as an experiment in changing perspective. It lets us observe what happens when a capacity conventionally associated with women occupies the centre of the explanation.
Who, then, does milk belong to? The carton leaves the question open while making the producing body unmistakably present. What it offers is a fantasy of milk and a body whose desires complicate any claim to its production.
Irmak Dönmez, Milk Plants; Human Milk for Cows II, 2025. Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, luster.
