My practice with food and cookery as both artistic medium and subject matter is informed by food anthropology and my background as a trained chef. In diverse ways I collaborate with professionals from other disciplines and with community groups and/or individuals to investigate the ever-shifting value and symbolism in what we eat. Through interactive public events presented as cookery and/or meal sharing performances, I provide embodied experiential engagement for audiences to ingest information on the ethical, political and environmental implications of modern foodways.
Since 2016 my work between Australia and Germany has been focussed on ethnobotanicals and the endless interconnections between plants and people. It is informed by co-species evolution from the perspective of human migration and the practice of seed carrying and foraging. My projects incorporate practices of urban farming and guerrilla gardening with wild edible plants to present a view that foraging is as fundamental to where we have come from as modern agriculture and deforestation is to where we are now, by understanding how in the past different cultures have managed land with biodiversity for healthy populations as well as healthy ecology. A lot is being said about the current resurgence of interest in traditional food systems and the role they play. “The types of people who forage are diverse, the act of foraging transcends social identity categories of race, class, age and gender, however in many places foods or extracts from specific wild plants maintain direct links between peoples culture, religion, ritual and mythology.” (Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice, 2014, ed. Cindy Isenhour)
For my work, wild plants are raw materials to view how food and medicine are derived from native and non-native invasive and non-invasive species, with a particular focus on weeds and the power systems behind such classifications. I use them to convey stories about relationships between biodiversity and sustainability and, agriculture, consumerism and climate change via micro-macro ecologies of the human microbiome and global ecological systems we are part of. Since 2018 The Conceptual Cookbook is part of my website to support ideas and document processes and the people I work with to cultivate crops and forage, cook or ferment plants. The archive is a document of interconnectedness via food-plant-people relationships, through dishes I have invented or reproduced to link research at institutions, experiences in community environments and the personal stories that people pass on as a recipe when food triggers memory.