The table is set for Kaye's 'live food' event, upstairs in the barn at Halstow.
LIVE FOOD AT HALSTOW | 15th MAY 2022
In the "live food" event, Alive (A-Live), Kaye Winwood explored some of the themes at the heart of Here’s to Thee. As an artist who often uses food as her material, Kaye draws on both the conceptual and experiential to realise this event that not only refers to the cider-making process itself but relates to the broader, more than human worlds, of people and microbes, that this project touches. Alive (A-live) takes its starting points from the farm’s rich landscape, the cider, the lyrics and paraphernalia of the wassail as its ingredients which are then carefully crafted to create a complex edible journey.
For her menu, Kaye used some of the terms appearing in the poster Cidermaking terms in the Devonshire dialect, re-imagining and transforming some of the terms into a series of food courses and tastes for guests to sample. Through her research, Kaye has been working with Simon, the Grays, and local food producers for guidance regarding produce and to consider its re-application within the menu. The emphasis of the menu is on the liveness of the foods - using cultures present in unpasteurised cheese, sourdough starters, and ferments alongside the tastes of apples, cider, lichen and windfallen fruit.
Kaye also worked with ceramicist Abigail North to present palm- and tablewares for the event with the clay sourced on the farm itself, and using the impressions of the orchard’s trees, to create platters of beautiful textural surfaces. Food is passed in a convivial nature from guest to guest, sharing bread as a symbol of companionship and resonating with the traditional passing of the wassail bowl. Having eaten together the guests were invited to feed the more-than-human life at Halstow, using fire and burial to feed into the diversity of the soil, the trees, the lichen, the air...§