Acts of Gathering

Jonathan Baldock
Corn Dolly I, II, III & V, 2012
Corn/wheat, card and paint

Jonathan Baldock (b.1980, Kent) is an artist whose work is saturated with physicality and wit, as well as an uncanny and macabre quality that channels his longstanding interest in myth and folklore. 

This series of masks are inspired by corn dollies, which are traditionally made from the last sheaf of corn cut at harvest. The spirit of the corn is thought to inhabit the dolly once the field has been harvested, eventually being returned – in sacrifice – to the earth when the field is ready to be sown again. Historically, different counties in the UK have been associated with varying shapes of dollies, which took hundreds of different forms, but Baldock’s works are a reimagined blend of these various designs and local vernaculars.  

The artist’s interest in craft and working-class histories stems from his family’s agricultural background working on the land in Kent. Baldock recreates his corn dollies as masks, a recurring motif throughout his practice, invoking the theatrical and psychological potency of hiding one’s identity. He originally created these life-size masks for a performance during his exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre in 2012 and has since coated them in gold paint.

Maria Nepomuceno
Você me alimenta (You feed me), 2022
Straw, fabric and ceramic

Maria Nepomuceno (b.1976, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian artist whose complex woven sculptures utilise traditional craft and basketry techniques to create works reminiscent of organic structures. They suggest animals, plants, the human body and landscapes ranging from the microscopic to the macrocosmic.

The notion of rope or straw as a connecting thread is as conceptual as it is literal in Nepomuceno’s practice and Você me alimenta represents a thread that ties ideas, knowledge and processes together through community.  Nepomuceno has worked with indigenous Huni Kuin people in the state of Acre in northern Brazil to develop weaving techniques in a desire to reconnect herself back to her family origins.

The sculpture is made from braided straw from the carnauba tree – a palm that grows in the dry area of Brazil known as the sertão in Cearà. The palm is known as the 'tree of life' because of its many uses and benefits as a source of food, wax, and material for making. It represents provenance, ancestry, the sprouting of roots, soil, fertility and vital energy.

Serge Attukwei Clottey 
Noko Y3 Dzen (Something in the world), 2018-2019 
Plastic and copper wire 

Serge Attukwei Clottey   
Better Days are Coming, 2016-2021
Kpan lala, audio 1.12.55 
With thanks to Ga Homowo Kpan Lala groups 

Serge Attukwei Clottey (b.1985, Ghana) uses found materials from his hometown of Accra, Ghana to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity, exploring personal and political narratives rooted in histories of trade, food and migration.  

Clottey reuses yellow Kufuor gallons that are initially used as cooking oil canisters and then recycled to collect water or fuel. These have become a prominent motif throughout his work and which he refers to as ‘Afrogallonism’.  

If you [experience] them hanging [ ] it is not hard to imagine these objects – constructed from Western plastic and imported to developing nations in a poorly planned administrative effort, then discarded and re-issued within a Western art space – changing their value and meaning.  

Better Days are Coming is an audio piece that takes its title from the harvest festival Homowo. It is celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, beginning in August ahead of the rainy season with the planting of crops - predominantly maize and yam. Homowo is a remembrance of the famine that once befell communities in pre-colonial Ghana. Today, consequences of climate change are once again resulting in poor crop yields, impacting both farmers and the communities they feed.

Learning from Artemisia, 2019-2020 
Mixed media (wallpaper, 3-channel video, tables and chairs)

Uriel Orlow (b.1973 Zurich, Switzerland) is an artist whose practice engages with legacies of colonialism and ideas of memory and social and ecological justice.

Originally commissioned by the Lubumbashi Biennale, Democratic Republic of Congo, Learning from Artemisia is a work about an traditional medicinal plant called Artemisia afra, which taken as an infusion, is used to prevent and treat malaria. Orlow worked for several months with a women’s cooperative in Lumata, south of Lubumbashi, that is growing Artemisia afra. The proceeds from their work are funding collective health insurance for them and their families.

Learning from Artemisia is an installation consisting of a three-channel video; it includes the words from a letter composed by the artist, images showing the work of the cooperative, and a video of Lumata-based music group Jeunes Étoiles des Astres singing about the virtues of Artemisia afra.

The work explores the sustainable cultivation of Artemisia afra for the purposes of traditional medicine as a way of caring for the health of both people and land, creating pathways to non-extractive relationships with natural resources and community solidarity.

Crying the Neck, 2023
Mixed media (ceramic, painting, found objects)

Lucy Stein (b.1979, Oxford) and Nina Royle (b.1986, Truro) are artists living and working in West Cornwall. ‘Crying the neck’ is a Cornish tradition that takes place when cutting the last sheaf of corn at the end of the farming year. It is a custom that was once widely observed and which has been revived by communities in Cornwall in recent years. The ritual is rooted in an animistic belief held amongst some rural farming communities that the spirit in the last crop of corn harvested should be honoured.

Crying the Neck explores both Wiccan traditions and the historical landscape of Cornwall. It examines the relationship of the female body to this traditional act, as well as its relationship to both the landscape and communities from which it originates.  

The work is presented as a harvest table and adorned with objects, including paintings, an Ogham alphabet banner, books, corn dollies and ceramic tiles. Akin to an altar, it possesses a ritualistic function and is both a celebration of a time of harvest as well as mourning – depicting a passing from one time of year to another, from the end of the agrarian fertile window and to the descent into winter and the dark half of the year.

Foragers (2022)

Jumana Manna (b. 1987, Palestine) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine and Israel. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to raise questions around the legislation restricting these traditional customs.

Foragers (2022), will be shown at CAST (Cornubian Arts & Science Trust) from 2 - 30 September 2023.

Food shapes culture and culture shapes food

Food has shaped human history, determining the paths we follow and the tools we favour; creating unions and war; changing landscapes and atmosphere. Food can energise us and treat our illnesses, but it can also be a vessel for our beliefs and cultures – a way of sustaining memory and connection. Speaking on the symbolism of cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata) in pre-colonial West Africa, Michael W. Twitty reflects that ‘[o]ur peas were tiny little texts, and we didn’t even know it’. Food carries its own language that can be spoken when people share practices, recipes and knowledge, connecting us to a story that extends beyond time and place.

Our relationship to food might not just be with the food itself, but also with the land and environment from which it emerges, and the work that goes into its production. Food can be a product of, and a gateway to, caring for the land. Many traditions and rituals honour the land as a way of giving thanks for food and recognise the interconnections between the health of both people and the earth. Harvest festivals - such as Homowo in Ghana and Guldize in Cornwall - dedicate time to show reverence to the land through song, celebration and ritual. Corn dollies represent the spirituality and animism important to certain growing practices, with the spirit of the corn being housed and looked after by the community over the winter. Other customs may be more tied to the use of the food. Plants used in traditional medicines, such as Artemisia afra, are passed down through generations, and natural materials, such as the straw from the carnauba tree, are used in traditional craft and weaving. The traditions explored in Acts of Gathering sustain a close connection to the land and explore how food creates relationships not only between people, but also with the wider world.

Food Culture and the modern food system

In the globalised food system, there is less value placed on food’s deeper, intrinsic meaning to community and culture. Instead, economics tends to determine who can access food and in what ways, whilst industrial growing practices are typically guided by efficiency rather than sustainability, creating a disconnection between the production of food and the health of the land. As the food system has become more centralised - with 1% of farms operating 70% of farmlands - peoples’ access to land has been reduced, particularly for rural women, Indigenous peoples and landless rural communities.

Through industrialised farming practices and increasing land inequality, the customary aspects of food growing, gathering, sharing and eating have been marginalised. This has been driven over centuries by processes of colonisation and land enclosure across the globe. As a result, traditional ways of cultivating the land, ancestral foods and generational knowledge, have been suppressed and eroded in many communities.

A communal food future

Despite these circumstances, a diversity of cultural practices surrounding food are still fed by communities that celebrate, forage, eat and grow in ways that are closely tied to, and with respect for, the land. Throughout human history, communities have governed and collectively tended to the land for food. Movements today sustain and revive this, as in the complementary work for food sovereignty and food commons found in different areas of the world. Food sovereignty can be understood as the ability of a community to define the way they access and interact with food, whilst the food commons is focused on food as a shared resource that is collectively managed through the act of ‘commoning’. Both of these approaches to growing, sharing and eating food place emphasis on the role and agency of the community, with the goal of culturally appropriate food being produced in a just and equitable way. This might be through community gardens, foraging or local food networks. These interrelated movements can create more direct relationships between people and food; growers and eaters; land and humans. By supporting the involvement of community in growing, harvesting, sharing and eating, traditions and connections can be nurtured.

Acts of Gathering

Acts of Gathering explores these ideas and invites people to think about their own connection to them, offering the space to consider what ritual and community mean in their own lives. It also celebrates the power of the imagination, of ceremony and of action, in reuniting us with each other and with the land.

Culture

The ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society. Oxford English Dictionary

Food Culture

The practices, attitudes and beliefs as well as the networks and institutions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of food. Lucy Long

Food Sovereignty

The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty

Food Justice

A movement that emphasises healthy, sustainable and equitable food as a human right and acknowledges the need to address structural barriers to that right. Sandra Murray

Food System

The way food is grown, processed, traded, transported, consumed or wasted, plus how it affects the health of people and planet. Eden Project Food Strategy

Traditional Medicine

The knowledge, skill and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures […] used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness. World Health Organisation

Foraging

To go from place to place searching for things that you can eat or use. Cambridge English Dictionary

Homowo

A harvest festival celebrated by the Ga people from the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Wikipedia

Crying the Neck

Part of the Guldize festival, this is when the last sheaf of corn is cut and the end of the harvest is proclaimed. CornwallForEver.co.uk

Guldize

A Cornish festival that traditionally marks the end of the corn harvest. Simon Reed

Kufuor Gallons

Plastic containers used to transport cooking oil, but often repurposed to carry water during water shortages in Ghana. Jacopo Prisco

Carnauba Palm

A species of palm tree native to northeastern Brazil. Known by many as the 'tree of life' because of its numerous uses. Wikipedia

Corn Dollies

A form of straw work made as a part of traditional harvest customs in Europe. It was believed that the dolly would house the spirit of the corn until the next season. Wikipedia

Afrogallonism

An artistic concept to explore the relationship between the prevalence of the yellow oil gallons in regard to consumption and necessity in the life of the modern African. Serge Attukwei Clottey

Ogham Alphabet

An Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language. Wikipedia

Animism

A way of relating to the world that attributes sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun or moon. Katherine Swancutt

Food Commons

When food is jointly produced, collectively managed and distributed based on community needs. Jose Luis Vivero-Pol

Commoning

The collective management and sharing of a resource in a community. Commoning Europe

Wicca

A modern Pagan religion; its followers typically identify as witches. Britannica

Sertão

A dry interior region of northeastern Brazil. Britannica

Artemisia afra

A soft aromatic shrub and popular medicinal plant indigenous to the African continent. Wikipedia

Cooperative

A farm, business or other organisation which is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits. Oxford Languages