A Collection of Reviews

Kate Farley creates designs for textiles, paper and beyond. She describes her work as ‘'strong graphic statements'’ and perhaps should not be restricted to the label of designer or artist, but better suits the title of ‘'subversive mark maker'’. Underpinned by modernism, her visual investigations are rooted in her childhood. Unusually for 1970s rural Britain, her parents filled the family home they built themselves with classic design objects meant for the everyday. In her recent
abstract, Kate describes a 3 pronged Focus Flatware fork, designed by Folke Arstrom for Gense, Sweden and how the extraordinary design of this object triggered her critical thinking about functional aesthetics.

Skip forward to Kate’s current practice and in her recent pattern collection Construct we see a strong link back to the fork. She defines the object as an everyday icon, believing that our lives are improved by beautiful but also useful things, and what could be more everyday than something you physically connect with morning, afternoon and night. Like her other collections, Construct began with a drawing implement and for this series, the tool that seemed most natural for Kate was a handmade fork. Just as the Folke Arstrom piece was ergonomically formed for eating, her drawing tool celebrated simplicity and was bespoke to the right thickness and strength of line required for the quality of Kate’s mark making.

The Construct pattern, inspired by woven threads, incorporates repeats of swooshes, subtle scrapes, curves, dots and wipes of the fork drawing tool. Dipping the 5 prongs into ink and pushing the uniformed marks around a surface inevitably narrates the form of the tool. It creates a contemporary, dynamic surface design, but this pattern also highlights the function of forks as story telling objects.

It could be argued that forks transcend the act of transporting food into the user’s mouth. People can use the fork to push a glutenous sauce into a clean area of the plate or to swirl up long, slippery fronds of pasta or pick up crisp sheets of lettuce leaves within a salad. At the end of a course, the fork leaves patterns on the dish to archive the history of meals and to map out the everyday identities within eating. In it’s completed forms, Construct communicates these identities across a range of textile objects, but most interestingly a Formica table surface.

As with other Modernist pieces, this classic 20th Century design product is now iconic in today’s design savvy scene. Pattern creators may see the opportunities with tablecloths, runners and placemats all used to protect and savour the surface of these tables to distribute their designs, but Kate subverts this by applying the fork’s eating marks directly to the surface of the table. Here we see marks created by fork, boldly printed across a surface created for the context of eating. This celebrates the beauty, but also honesty of purpose and function within design and as Kate concluded in her recent abstract, this combination should inspire other makers ‘'to challenge the design of the everyday tomorrow’'.

Domestic Godless are a 3-person collective operating out of Cork, Ireland. Each with their own individual practices, they come together under this moniker to create artistic and culinary mayhem, cause gastronomic havoc and generally play with the idea of what is edible. Their Canaliculus Purgamentorum event, which I saw at Dublin’s Broadstone Studios in January last year, borrows the format of the sushi carousels we know from popular Japanese chain, Yo! Sushi. Except the Domestic Godless version is, in typical tongue-in-cheek fashion, made from sewage ducting (unused, we hope). 

This was an intimate event, repeated on two consecutive nights. The pipes were laid out along a set of blue-and-white tableclothed long tables. Water flowed through the partially open pipes, carrying curious amuse-bouches created for the event. Initially the audience tentatively observed and snapped photos, wary of the strange looking food strewn about the room and floating along the ‘canal’, but gradually as we imbibed the home-made Gripe water and other drinks, everyone relaxed. Curiosity trumped fear. 

The medley of boats and rafts and other receptacles holding the food meandered down the pipes and the antiquarian drawing room made an atmospheric backdrop.  The event was partly inspired by the universal experience (in Ireland at least) of the miserable seaside holiday, though the imagery on offer was not limited by this theme. We were served the stuffing from the seats of a 1974 Ford Cortina and ice-cream mixed with the contents of an Edwardian vanity cabinet. We tried edible fly-paper, curiously coloured communion wafers, and sheep testicles (surprisingly soft). There was also edible self-tanning foam (particularly delicious), and an overflow pipe that leaked blood red liquid into a shell, which guests could drink with a pipette.

A second reference point was Broadstone Studio’s previous existence as the Asylum for Aged Governesses and Unmarried Ladies in 1870.  An entire ox tongue was laid out obscenely under a rather terrifying portrait of ‘Meredith’, the matriarch from the Asylum. I think it may have actually been Meredith's tongue.  Sprawling cephalopods featured prominently and dramatically; outrageous creatures from the sea (squid, octopus) were strewn on black sand made from quinoa and flavoured with seaweed. We were served singular baked beans, escapees from a Full Irish breakfast. Brussel sprout ‘cake pops’ protruded deceptively from a parsnip.

The whimsical nature of some of the concoctions on offer, and the theatrical means by which they were presented was offset by the dark humour of Domestic Godless. Alongside a keen eye for the macabre, there clearly lies a huge love and understanding of food and its possibilities, in both gastronomic and aesthetic terms. In what felt like their scientific laboratory at the end of the room we were in, I was offered a taste of an amazing ‘coconut jam’, not the eggy ‘kaya’ of Southeast Asia, but their own invention made by slowly reducing and condensing coconut milk with coconut blossom sugar.

Memory, sensation, and in a certain sense nostalgia, is the stock in trade of the Domestic Godless, but with a twist. Rather than faithful copies of actual dishes from the past, Domestic Godless dive into the surreal. Unlike the Futurist’s abstruse and unappetising creations, Domestic Godless make food you want to touch, taste, and devour. While provocative, challenging, and gruesome at times, the end result is always edible and often delicious (well, maybe not the Brussels sprouts cake pops). More importantly its absurdity strikes right at our sense of what it is possible to eat. This visceral challenging of our preconceptions makes us rediscover childlike feelings of wonder and horror, feelings we may have lost in our current overfed and jaded food culture.