I’ve been travelling in Mexico for the last month, the last two weeks I have spent undertaking a residency in Oaxaca City, at Pocoapoca and exploring the city and its surrounds. I love Mexico. The food, the people, the smells, the language, the markets. I loved the beach and the cenotes in the Yucatan, and the streets of Roma in CDMX. I can definitely see myself here for longer, alas, this is my final week before I head back to Cornersmith, where I hope to work in some new recipes for the summer menu from the many amazing things I have eaten here and been inspired by.
I’ve been working towards a collaborative dinner that I am hosting with Mexican food designer Verónica González. During my time here in Mexico I have been thinking about the ritual of eating and how to create a new kind of food experience that changes the way we eat and think about food. The decision to seek a collaborative partner for my final work at the residency wasn’t exactly thought out. I discovered Verónica’s work by chance when scrolling though Instagram, her by line on her personal account was ‘moved by the way we eat’ and her photographs were a mix of styled food images and conceptual portraits. I reached out to her without an agenda and our interactions since then have been pretty organic, slowly bringing the idea for a dinner to life through independent and collaborative research, knowing throughout the process that we were working towards a ‘dinner’, without knowing exactly what that will look like.
I have always wanted to incorporate food into my creative practice. Previously I have used the camera as a tool for investigating my position and the position of others in space and time, as relative to the rest of the world. But I feel as though food, and events that happen and are created around food, may also be used for a similar investigation.
During my time at art school and since, my work has mostly used a combination of video and performance, dealing with concepts of time and focusing on ‘non-events’ or time spent outside of what is normally deemed be ‘eventful’. My masters research paper explored the idea of time by looking at artists, filmmakers and writers who investigate the liminal space between the still and the moving image. Anthropologist Victor Turner described the liminal as the ‘no longer/not yet’ a state whereby ‘the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance’. This concept of ‘pure potentiality’ underpins my own artistic practice to date and is something I would like to investigate more as my practice develops with and around food as a vehicle for artistic exploration. I’ve been experimenting with creating new food rituals as part of my research here and I am understanding the connections between these rituals and how I have previously thought of liminality and concepts of the event. Its amazing finally make these connections. I feel like there is magic here; magic that has existed here before and magic that is being created.
