Studio/Kitchen/Pile: Composting with contemporary art practices

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 2: Art and Practice

Abstract

Domestic composting often starts in the kitchen. This paper explores how contemporary art made or staged in the kitchen provides fertile terrain for exploring how art practices might form aerobic connections between environmental humanities and feminisms. The kitchen is a fraught site for both disciplines. Our food and culinary environments have global implications, making food and eating of critical concern for the environmental humanities. Women’s roles and place in the kitchen have been troubled, emancipated, and critiqued by feminist thinking. Before women had full access to higher education, home economics kitchens served as laboratories for scientists unable to pursue science degrees, yet home economics was derided by second wave feminisms. Plunging into this complex heap, contemporary artists have found the kitchen to be a vital space for critique and production, mixing and turning everything from hormones to sauerkraut. How might art practices in the kitchen complicate and decompose connections between feminisms and environmental humanities? Starting with historic tensions embedded in the kitchen, this paper will turn to close readings of kitchen art practices, including Mary Maggic’s Housewives Making Drugs (2015-ongoing), Beatriz da Costa’s Anti-Cancer Survival Kit (2015), and works from Lauren Fournier’s “Fermenting Feminisms” series, including Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s Probiotics of the Kitchen (2017). These practices will then be put in dialogue with the author’s own kitchen installation at the Human Non Human exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, Food, on display during and around the corner from the 4S conference.

Author

• Lindsay Kelley, UNSW Art & Design