food art

Food Creatures: the joys and challenges of food art photography

Culinary Art / March 30, 2022

food art, reduce food waste, plant based food, food photography, branding photography Recently, I started doing website branding photography for the new lobe lokal at Lobe Block in Wedding, Berlin. The core part of this role is to photograph brand new dishes for the restaurant – colourful culinary creations designed to wow the senses… truly, food art! Photographing (and filming) delicious ingredients, vibrant fruits, earthy vegetables, and magical cooking processes has always been at the heart of my own artistic practice. Given my double profession – as an artist and a cook – these crossovers come naturally. 

However, what I have been discovering from this branding photography work is that being faced with food art born from someone else’s imagination and hands – truly capturing its structure, its colours, its consistencies, as well as creating an image that conveys its nurturing richness – is a totally different endeavour. 

food art, reduce food waste, plant based food, food photography, branding photography Truthfully, this process of capturing the essence of the new dishes felt like meeting delicate creatures, each one a story of its own. They addressed me with their demands: meet me, look at me, study me, show me. And – for their photographer, me – it’s a race against time. They fade, they stick, they dry up, they keep changing and, once they change, there is no turning back.

After the first session, I found that I was both deeply exhausted and moved.

food art, reduce food waste, plant based food, food photography, branding photography So I was really glad to join a food art photography session led by the wonderful Erin Lang – musician, chef, and founder of Bloom & Echo – and her partner Sam. Joining their team for this project, I was able to observe her wonderful way of approaching this new set of culinary creations.

And, since depicting the working process and its many creative layers has long been a core subject in my own work, it was a real pleasure to combine these worlds once again.

The Magic of Portrait Photography (Part One)

Photography in Berlin / October 20, 2021

food waste reduction, quinces 2021I adore quinces. I love their velvet skins, the hard bodies, their rich perfume, their androgyne character, their rich yellow colour that turns red in the cooking process. I love how they challenge me as a cook and I love their role in ancient cooking practices – both here, in Europe, and in the SWANA* region – and find it interesting to think about what traditions they have been part of throughout history. In fact, I am currently experimenting with some Jewish SWANA recipes, both savoury and sweet: I have a wonderfully large quince harvest waiting for me on my balcony at home and, true to type, will be documenting my processes in working with them this season.

Outwith my own kitchen, I am devoting time and energy to a brand new space that, like my own kitchen, will be home to exciting experiments and adventures in all things food – including food waste reduction – and the senses.

creativity workshops, art workshops, Lobe Berlin 2021Lobe is a house project in Wedding: a newly built, brutalist concrete building defined by its terraces, its garden – where, among other things, quinces grow – and its many cohabiting animals. Soon, its ground floor units will become one space, a fresh, joint space for events, workshops, food experiments, and a lab for creating a more sustainable future.

Ana Zatezalo and Olivia Reynolds are the founders of this new space and project. With quinces fresh in from the harvest of the Lobe garden and the quince being chosen as the symbol of their new venture (name to be revealed!), I knew that I just had to channel my empowering photography approach to capture them with these brilliant fruits as a symbolic starting point of their collaboration journey.

So, what happens when you bring artistic, innovative women and versatile, delicious fruits together?

personal branding photography, portraits of women, empowering photographyNot least a dream commission for me as a portrait photographer in the world of personal branding photography… weaving together my roles as a member of the founding team, cook, and photographer – one who specialises in portraits of women and fruits! – and capturing the very essence of Lobe’s future here in Berlin.

Over the next couple of months, I will be the one to create all of Ana and Olivia’s website photography: ultimately creating online portraits that communicate the playful potential in business collaboration. This is part of my work that I really love – distilling and celebrating the character and mission of fascinating people who are creating important work. So, watch this space…

*SWANA is an acronym referring to the wide geographical area which encompasses South West Asia and North Africa.

 

Secret Colors Hidden Within

Food & conservation, Sensory Art / September 3, 2021

Hello there,

When I first read about the practice of Lucila Kenny and her approach to natural dyes my heart skipped a beat. The way she connects the political and ethical questions with the care for the plants we find around us and the joy of creating just makes so much sense.

Yesterday I finally had the honor of participating in one of her “Making Colors with Food Waste” workshops at the amazing new project space in Neuköln WirWir run by April Gertler and Adrian Schiesser.

Here is the outcome of three recipes: red currents, yellow onion skins and red beet skins with four different fabrics:

As I work in my creativity workshops with colors, food, drawing, scent and processes of transformation, Lucila’s perspective on colors hidden within the plants in often unexpected parts is deeply moving. It shifts our perception in yet another direction and opens a new world of relations and fields of experimentation that I want to integrate more into my own workshops in the future.

For example it is the greens of the carrot that can produce a bright yellow color whereas the carrots  – staining orange on the touch while handling them – contain close to no transferable colors. A whole new field has opened and I am so looking forward to explore it with you!

I also want to share with you a related work I produced a year ago for a solo show with Hans-Jörg Mayer at after the butcher in Berlin. It was a show and a site-specific video work connecting the art works to the space and to different recipes for fermented vegetables. The plants were then fermenting in the exhibition space along side the art works and were shared with the visitors at the closing of the show.

Honoring the Leftovers

Food & conservation / July 9, 2021

Welcome to July!

With all the fresh produce and food this time of year offers, I’d like to share the story behind one of my creativity workshops, Color Food Fun.

As an artist and a mother, I take a lot of inspiration from my kids’ playfulness, curiosity and their willingness to try out new things. When my son was learning about the different aspects of food production in school, I offered to give a workshop on food waste reduction. As some of you may know, I love an opportunity to improvise! Why not see how children could learn about the political aspects of food using leftovers?

 I asked parents to send their child to school with a cutting board and one ‘leftover’ food item from the fridge. In a sense, it was going to be an experiment about how we can change our relationship to food. And what better group than kids with little or no experience with cooking!

As an interdisciplinary artist, process and connections are a major theme in my work. I wanted the children to spend time with whatever they brought and form a connection through making drawings of their carrot, tomato or cabbage.

It became so personal for each child, like a poetic act of honoring the food.

After cutting out their drawings, they made a big collage together – grouping colors, types of food and possible relationships. The food became little islands of ‘players’. I was so thrilled to see their excitement and joy as they formed cooking groups based on the organization of the collage. I stood back and let them be the creators unless they needed help.

The energetic community of these young chefs was so beautiful to watch!

At the end, we shared in this delicious and unexpected buffet. The kids wanted to taste everything which is unusual because children can be quite picky. Food became an exciting adventure in how to look at it, how to serve it and how to taste it.

Afterwards, parents called to tell me how much fun their child had and how it had triggered a lot of reflection about food. The political aspect had been felt through the different processes, subtly woven into the experience.

I took what I had learned from the workshop and brought it back to my office. Once a month, I asked my colleagues to bring in one food item or leftovers from home. I then created a big lunchtime communal meal. As we ate, people would try and guess which part of the meal incorporated their special ingredient. Instead of the usual lunch of grabbing take out and eating at their desks, we became an engaged group sharing food together.

I’d love to invite you to do this with your children and friends. Plan a dinner party where everyone brings something and co-create a meal together. Set the table and welcome in a spontaneous creative atmosphere. It may feel a bit strange to put the recipes and planning aside, but as the kids taught me, isn’t that part of the fun?

Happy experimenting!

Ines

Scent Soup: the power of unusual connections

Sensory Art / June 11, 2021

Spring is in full bloom! 

With the scent of lilacs, peonies and lavender in the air, I hope you’re taking some time to enjoy these warm longer days. I want this to be a space of sharing, so I thought this is the perfect time of year to celebrate how the connections between the senses became integral to my art. We’ll travel back to when I was an art student, visiting a seaside garden in France, deep in May, the plants in full blossom, the bees heavy with pollen. I wanted to photograph and film the plant’s interactions with one another. For me, connections and relationships are essential in making art and the flowers were the perfect subjects for portraiture and composition. 

Upon returning to Paris, by some strange synchronicity, I found a Vietnamese restaurant called Fleurs de mai. Reminded of the seaside garden, I walked in and was immediately immersed in this deep scent saturating the space. It took many return visits to try and identify the layers of the scent such as different algae, mushrooms and herbs. Finally, I created a recipe for a ‘scent soup’ that invoked the restaurant. I wondered what would occur through combining the flower visuals with the restaurant’s strong unrelated scent. In a room at the Art Academy, I cooked the ‘scent soup’ for hours until its vapors permeated the room. 

As people entered, I projected the images from the lush seaside garden. Sound became another layer as I stirred and moved objects around in a spontaneous performance piece. 

Later, people that had attended told me that when they saw some of the particular flowers from the film in real life, they smelled the scent of the soup! 

I realized I had created a totally new relationship that provoked images and memories.

The richer a sensory experience –  when your eyes, ears, nose and taste are all stimulated- the more the encounter inscribes itself upon you. 

I started to look at how scent relates to color. I liked the idea of using color as a common connection between people because everyone relates to color and feels safe when talking about color. As one of my art workshops at a food art week, Color Correspondence became a space to practice paying attention to what happens when we make unusual connections between the senses. What an incredible experience! Combining color with scent invoked emotions, stories, memories and images within the group. Together we discovered this creative personal space that triggered so much play and exploration. 

Usually when people think of unusual connections between the senses, the word synesthesia comes up. We think of it as a mysterious condition reserved for geniuses or famous musicians that ‘hear’ colors. We assume we don’t have access to these deeply rich and complex sensory experiences. As an artist, I was reluctant to use the word in relation to my work for its overly hyped reputation. But then I read The Superhuman Mind by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow, a book that describes this phenomenon in scientific terms. Of course, it’s still a poetic concept but also about using the senses to stimulate the different areas of your brain in order to make lasting connections. 

Through the senses, we all have access to changing how we perceive and memorize the world. 

I had found the science behind what I’d already experienced with my art and creativity workshops. This sensory work can even be a part of memorizing techniques or learning new skills. By including as many senses as possible, memory capacity is enhanced and you can train the brain through practice and use. Your perception of the world changes. 

Each experience is its own story made up of what we see, taste, smell, hear and touch. As an interdisciplinary artist, my passion is in separating out each sensory layer and then recombining them to create new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world around us. I invite you to take some time during these sunny days as the world begins to reopen to get curious about your sensory experiences – play, connect and discover.