Exploring relationships with the things we eat by word of mouth
Food and drink, eating and drinking. An everyday occurrence and also a chance to socialise. “What’ll I have for dinner?” “Do you want to meet for coffee?” It’s a ritual for some – to eat certain things on certain days – a love language for many and a source of pain for others. These things we eat, to sustain ourselves, are also things that bind us together no matter where you’re from.
It’s this thought process that’s behind Word of Mouth, a new exhibition about food and how it informs our lives, which is showing now at Edinburgh’s Storytelling Centre.
Curator Maisie Wills explained the thinking behind it, saying: “The exhibition is an open submission exhibition that explores our relationships with food, with cooking and kitchens, in quite a broad, varied sense.
“There’s about 60 contributors to this exhibition, and it’s divided between visual art and writing – and everything is all displayed together. It gives a very broad overview of our contemporary relationship with food.”
Wills went on to explain that it started as an idea that developed with her friends, during Covid.
“The exhibition has a real origin story, which I like,” she said. “It’s based originally on some events that myself and my friends, Millie and Eleanor used to host during Covid – at their flats – which were called word of mouth.
“This was where we invited our friends, or people that we’d worked with, who we didn’t maybe know that well, to come and share some food and also bring a piece of writing to share.
“That piece of writing, it didn’t necessarily have to be something that you’d written, it could just be like a funny email you received or a text, a post-it note, literally anything.”
These events, which blossomed into a group of about 15, petered out when Wills’ friend Eleanor moved away. But they stayed in her mind, and informed the current exhibition. She explained: “Millie and I thought it’d be cool to broaden Word of Mouth out to a wider community in the city.”
The submissions have, however, come from all over Scotland and the UK. This response has blown Maisie away, but shows how food connects us.
She said: “I think lots of people have contributed where they maybe wouldn’t think of themselves as an artist as such, but because it’s to do with food, this thing that we all experience. They’ve been really keen to try something new, which I really like.”
Wills expected about 15 submissions when the open call went out at the end of last year but, she said, “it really took off.”
Luckily, given the wall space and seated booth area (the exhibition is on the same level as the cafe at the centre), she’s been able to show all of the works that were submitted by the deadline. It’s a mix of children’s paintings showing food, to written word, poems, paintings, linographs, collage and textiles.
Some submissions are simple recipes while others explore a darker side to food, such as eating disorders and our relationship with our bodies.
“Something I was really struck by was the writing, which was very poignant,” said Wills. “There’s writing about darker times, which involve food. There’s a few pieces of writing on disordered eating. There’s a really beautiful long form essay looking at a pregnancy loss through the metaphor of food and eating, and some writing about Gaza and food, which is really, really powerful.
“I think it’s been interesting, because it’s maybe easy to be naive about it, and just think, ‘oh, it’s going to be cute little recipes.’ But it’s been a really varied response and it’s made me reflect on my own relationship with food. To just see how other people have used it as a device to explore very wide, deep issues and experiences.”
Wills’ experience of putting the exhibition together reflect those that have been to see it so far, with feedback commenting on the reflective nature of the work particularly the alcove seating space where you’ll see some recipes, poems, writing and a short manual on how to make Marmite on toast, submitted by a French person living in Scotland, who wanted to explain this simple task to their parents. As Wills said: “Food is something we all need but our relationships and experiences are so varied.”
It makes perfect sense to have such an exhibition, one which sparks conversation but also a wider debate, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre though, given its success, Wills is keen to try it out in other cities.
She said: “For me, it was a perfect place to do this project as a lot of the philosophy of Word of Mouth is about sharing, and storytelling, and just coming together and bonding with strangers and with friends. The idea is to inspire people to do a form of Word of Mouth themselves, with their own networks and their own groups.
“But I’d really love to maybe try and do something like this again, this summer, in Glasgow as it’d be interesting to do it in a different city.”
Word of Mouth is showing at The Scottish Storytelling Centre until Saturday. It’s a free, un-ticketed event and the centre is open from 10am-6pm. To hear more about the exhibition, search Scran wherever you get your podcasts.
The exhibition gives a broad overview of our contemporary relationship with food