mouth to mouth, heart to heart

'Mouth to Mouth, Heart to Heart' was a collection of individualised, once-off desserts made for each of the attendees of the Sculpture Banquet.

I wanted to celebrate togetherness and love as a form of resistance against the pervasive loneliness of the modern world and neoliberal capitalism. Through the project I discovered that the vast majority of the students in my class eat alone. Though cooking and eating together have been central to human existence and evolution, it seems to me that they are becoming vestigial in our culture. To me this highlights the degradation of community and communal ways of being in our daily lives.

I wanted to embrace physicality and embodiment, and go beyond the visual and aural experience of the zoom call and the “new normal”, extending the experience to touch, taste, smell, and physical presence.

I cast the mouths of the attendees, addressing the mouth as a point of communication, intimacy and taboo (in our current context). From these I made the wibbly wobbly wonders - half ice-cream, half jelly, in a chocolate shell - to celebrate the joys of the everyday. The ice-cream was a sorbet made from wild foraged raspberries and blackberries from the Royal Canal and honey from bees at St. Audoen's church, the jelly was made from foraged rosehips from Broombridge and rowan berries also from St. Audoen's church.

By incorporating communal foraging I wanted to exposed people to sensory experiences other than consumption, resist the mass produced "convenience culture" of the globalised food economy and ground the experience in the specificity of the local environment. I wanted to reconnect people with their senses, their bodies, their environment and with each other through the bonding experience of communal eating.