FEAST's Laura Mansfield is working with Touchstones Art Gallery on a major co-curation project transforming the museum into an (inter)active communal space. The project is harnessing everyday activities of eating, cooking and preparing food as a means to bring together diverse communities, critically engage with the museum collection and share multiple histories of the borough. Working closely with representatives from across the community and commissioned artists Aliyah Hussain, Camara Pinnock and Ibukun Baldwin the project radically reimagines the form a traditional museum can take.

*Image, Ibukun Baldwin 'Food Forest' Rochdale youth service 2024

Each year FEAST works with Hospitalfield to develop a programme of talks and workshops as part of their summer festival. For the summer of 2024 we explored the urgent theme of GRAIN. 

The programme of workshops, talks and film screenings, sought to explore a range of alternative modes of grain production and usage; looking comparatively at global, industrial structures alongside local networks of growing, harvesting, milling and distributing grain. Connecting with Hospitalfield's collaboration with Kultura Medialna in Dnipro (Ukraine), and artists and curators Katya Rusetska and Diana Khalilova, an exploration of communal and collaborative approaches to growing further explored the political resonance of the history and contemporary global grain industry.

A project on the Andersen Ward, a specialist mother and baby unit at Wythenshawe hospital in Greater Manchester. 

Having received Arts Council England Funding, FEAST worked with artists Aliyah Hussain and Niamh Riordan, and mental health researcher and florist Leanne Cook to develop a regular programme of workshops centred around making crockery, cutlery and table decorations, embracing the day to day rituals of life on the ward.

The precious nature of water, to drink, grow with, wash or swim in, has become the focus of much of our attention. The language we use to describe bodies of water – the speed of flow or surge, the rhythm of ebb and the stillness of stagnation, echoes our descriptions of time and how we communicate its passing. Yet as the summers grow warmer and drier due to the impacts of climate change, and heavy storms become more frequent, we experience our encounter with water not by natural rhythms but temporal extremes. 

In thinking about water in the contemporary moment, Hospitalfield's Summer Festival considered the changing temporal needs of our interactions with water, from saving (not wasting) to slowing and the rhythms of re-use. Bringing together artists, writers, researchers, growers, dowsers and musicians, the programme explored water as a richly sensory material, a poetic image and a precious resource.

Artist Sneha Solanki and her two daughters, Rasa and Sona hosted a workshop for FEAST’s botanical library project. Together with participants the family explored edible 'things' found growing wild at the edges of the community garden site. The workshop was part of Sneha's ongoing project EATING | THINGS.

An exploration of the newly planted Medicinal Garden with herbalist Edwina Hodgkinson. Participants made seasonal cider and syrups whilst learning about the health benefits of plants

Soil, from the earth we turn over on our vegetable plots, to the mud clogging our walking boots, contains a multitude of properties that are essential to a healthily functioning biosphere. The ‘dirty’ or ‘dusty’ appearance of soil belies its nature as a highly dynamic living entity - a rich web of rock particles, decaying organic matter, roots, fungi and microorganisms. Working with artists, researchers and film makers the programme for Hopsitalfield's Summer Festival attempted to share knowledge and practical know-how of how to engage more closely with the complexities of soil. Using a sensory engagement with the materiality of soil — from feeling the structure of different soil types to listening to the sounds of the soil and reflecting upon the history and poetics of composted earth to start to build a foundation for a future caring relationship.

Artist Gregory Herbert was invited to develop a workshop as part of FEASTs Botanical Library project. Greg created handheld clay quadrants that encouraged the user to look closely at small pockets of the ground, thinking about what they can see, feel, hear and smell in each section. The quadrants were designed to be playfully combined with string to make larger webs or meshes for investigating bigger areas of the space and the more than human life within each mapped section.

In collaboration with The Manchester Ear (Ryan Woods), FEAST hosted a day’s workshop on deep listening, soundwalking and field recording, exploring the community space of Fallowfield Secret Garden community garden through listening practices and technologies. Participants were introduced to concepts of ‘acoustic ecology’ with work made throughout the workshop presented during an evening showcase.

FEAST's programme for Hospitalfield's annual Summer Festival focused on the many uses of plants in the treatment of illness. The history of modern medicine has its roots in herbalism, as our skills with organic chemistry developed individuals were able to modify and adapt plants, extracting different compounds for the treatment of disease. The days programme explored plants as both herbal medicine and a vital compound in contemporary pharmaceuticals. 

Shaping the programme entailed undertaking numerous research routes. For the festival Feast compiled a selection of resources for each talk, sharing links to the experts we had been in contact with and the research projects we encountered throughout the programme’s development. Our research into the programme further lay the foundations for FEAST's Botanical Library project. 

Sharing their research into museum and the salt formed landscape of mid-Cheshire Fairland Collective hosted a salty baquet at The Lion Salt Works. Using local wild food, Salt Works pickles and a bit of theatre, the evening was a celebratory meal of salty discovery, featuring a saltscape of salt shakers, readings on salt tourism and halophytes, and salt themed musical accompaniment from Chester folk band The Time Bandits.

Sugar Library was developed by Ellie Doney for FEAST: Sugar. Ellie presented the library at Institute of Making’s Annual Open Day ‘Delight and Disgust’ and FEAST’s event Bitter Sweet at Manchester Museum.

The Sugar Library invited visitors to taste samples from a collection of sugars exploring the diverse materiality of sugar and its transformative properties on our bodies, senses and imagination.

Collaborating with Ellie Doney and Museumand, The National Caribbean Heritage Museum, FEAST hosted an evening exploring our complex relationship to sugar and its hidden histories at Manchester Museum 

Ellie developed a making and tasting workshop revealing the active properties and diverse morphology of sugar alongside her Sugar Library and a screening of Museumand’s film White Gold.

In response to some of the challenges facing local Angus producers - from a shortage of seasonal farm workers to a loss of the restaurant market, FEAST developed two talks panels for Hospitalfield's annual summer festival. Each panel explored questions of labour and alternative models of production. Panel participants introduced a range of perspectives on commercial growing in an effort to present pathways for a more sustainable future.

In addition to the talks the film ‘Foreign Pickers’ by artists MyVillages & Company Drinks was screened throughout the day as well as an edition of artist Sneha Solanki's ongoing project eating/things.

To mark the launch of FEAST: Consuming Children guest editors Sarah Hardstaff and Dawn Sandrella-Ayres hosted a roundtable discussion exploring food in children's literature - from traditional fairy tales to American College girl fiction at the Children's Literature Research Centre, Cambridge University

They were further in conversation with the edition contributions Christopher Owen and Amy Webster at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections, drawing upon titles in the Children's Book Collection in reference to their research into the use of food as metaphor, signifier and plot in children’s fiction. 

As part of their public programme Hospitalfield hosts an annual summer festival showcasing the rich array of food and drink producers in Angus and Tayside. Set alongside a programme of talks, workshops, events and music the festival explores the various ecologies of the region, sharing knowledge, produce and creative projects. Since 2019 FEAST has worked with Hospitalfield to develop a programme of talks and participatory workshops that explore a given thematic.  

Reflecting the location of Hospitalfield, in the region of Angus, where the majority, if not all of the cereal crops grown go to large malting companies our first contribution to the festival explored different approaches to growing grains - from the contemporary movement towards using population strands of grain, to the use of heritage varieties of crop and the establishment of the Barley Hub at The James Hutton Institute, Dundee.

Bringing together 17 practitioners from the fields of design, jewellery, ceramics, metalwork and sculpture Ambiguous Implements is a touring exhibition presenting a selection contemporary works that playfully reconsider the familiar objects of our day to day domestic life.  Re-thinking the tools we use for eating, grooming, cooking and cleaning, the exhibiting artists have employed and subverted traditional craft techniques, reframed existing tools in new sculptural assemblages, or given seemingly banal objects new functions and effects.

Participating artists include; Rob Anderson, Aimee Bollu, Caroline Broadhead, David Clarke, Nuala Clooney, Rachael Colley, Rosie Deegan, Kate Farley, Daniel Fogarty, Kate Haywood, Jasleen Kaur, Julie Mellor, Maria Militsi, Rebecca Ounstead, Matt Rowe, Jonathan Trayte & Abbie Williams.

Two symposia were held exploring processes of design and reinterpretation of everyday tools and utensils at Folkestone Museum and The School of Jewellery, Birmingham City University.

An evening meal exploring the making and eating of food in the life and work of Anthony Burgess in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation Manchester and chef Mary Ellen McTague. 

The artist Marie Toseland was commissioned to produce a new film work for the evening and a series of readings of recipes from Burgess's works were performed by Dr. Sam Ilingworth, Dr. Angelica Michelis and Susannah Worth alongside musical performances by the tenor Timothy Langston.

An exhibition exploring food and identity in the work of writer Anthony Burgess. Working with The International Anthony Burgess Foundation Manchester and Special Collections Manchester Metropolitan University, FEAST brought together together archival material to explore the food of Burgess’s 'north'.