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Victory Bread, Installation: April 2019

Tactile, sensory and durational; the three intrinsic elements of my food- based studio practice, but also of bread itself. I have been looking to bread as a vehicle to gain insight into history, and it’s durational, ritualistic process. My installation presents the grain's social function as a means of storytelling; one which initiates and fuels our cultural memory.

The kitchen environment points to the role of women and domesticity. Working with bread as a focus and medium has enabled me to create tactile, sensory and economical sculptures. Bread’s evocative suppleness means that it can be depicted as a symbol for universality, presenting itself as a quintessential kitchen staple. Yet it also highlights the variance of tradition, social exchange, and issues around consumerism & consumption. Bread sustains us, both nutritionally and culturally.


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audience interaction at the pre-degree show

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victory bread - details 

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from wheat to customer...

Some of my favourites from Parsons Bread Book (1974)

“There is nothing except political activism that better demonstrates the desire of today's young people to change the"plastic"world of galloping consumerism than their revival of the traditional crafts. The baking of bread has been one of the most popular.”

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crispy

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kiln fired bread

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victory bread

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conception || pregnancy || birth

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some of my favourites from Lexie Smith’s Bread on Earth instagram account 

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Lexie Smith

Working across mediums, Lexie Smith’s current primary forms are bread and language, though she design things on screens, too. Based in Queens, New York, Lexie runs Bread on Earth, a site dedicated to the tangential exploration of our politicised and intimate relationship to grain, a projects she launched in 2016. 

She also creates bread sculptures which are preserved in beeswax, plaster and hemp twine. Alongside this, she makes abstract recipes and portraits, as well as bread masks. Smith also utilises the medium of drawing. 

Creating edible installations, sculptures and prose with — and about — bread, Smith uses food not only as a medium, but also as a means of exploring culture. For her, there’s nothing more telling about a society than the way they engage — or don’t engage — with bread. “It holds within it a large spectrum of the human experience,” she says.

“For me, it’s as much about not creating waste, as it is not being attached to some flippant product of my hands that I really try not to attach ego to,” she explains.

“Bread is a really universal thing, but also a really intimate symbol that’s at once representative of both completely different sides of the economic scale. So, it represents the linguistics and actuality of money, just in the color of bread, and then all the way down to being the ultimate symbol of the peasant masses.”

“Bread is about so much more than bread,” Smith tells Bustle. “Bread is present in and steeped with the politics of identity, history, economics, and the environment, in nearly every culture on earth. This makes it easy to see as a yoke between places and peoples, and in many ways it is, but it also delivers us evidence of just as much human conflict, divisiveness, manipulation, and selfishness. The reason bread is a captivating and rich medium is because it can show both of the sides equally.”

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Bread on Earth is a publishing platform supporting the diverse dialogues that stem from our relationship to grain.

The platform uses bread as a lens to see different parts of the world up close. By focusing on this ultimate human icon, the focus is on finding pathways to creativity and community, and narratives on history, design, and the environment.

This interim website houses writing, photos, research, recipes, and other related ephemera, to build the Bread Web: a worldwide map of bread types, linking varieties to their relatives across the globe. It acts as a forum for conversations and contributions, welcoming writing, visuals (illustrations, photos, etc.), recipes, and big or little ideas.

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developmental animation

tactile, sensory, durational