Food Project

To start with I chose to research into the social aspects of food, mainly dinner parties and how these have varied over the years. I came across an artist Judy Chicago who produced a large scale instillation of a dinner table. Its a feminist piece celebrating important women throughout history. Each place setting is individually designed for the person it is made for, hand embroidery on the napkin and on the runner. I loved this piece not only for the beautiful embroidery but for the amount of thought and detail that went into it. There are thirty nine place settings on the triangular table and 999 women's names carved into the tiled floor.

From this piece I was inspired to look at other feminist art and think about ways of using it in my work and linking this with the food brief, thinking about gender associations, stereotypes and roles. This then lead on to knitting and how its mainly done by women and is seen by some as traditional domestic work. Combining this with food is the next step.