The project 'Soup' was part of the Sculpture Banquet to celebrate our first opportunity to have an event and be physically present together post covid. I was exploring Irish food culture, and how colonialism created a disconnection from our native edibles and food cultures. I was looking at how food is our most direct connection to the environment and landscape and how this connection has been severed by globalisation, as well as the disconnection from place created by distanced learning. I wanted to celebrate the less appreciated senses of touch, taste, and smell which we were divorced from over zoom. Eating is one of the most immersive sensory experiences as it engages all five senses in unison, so I wanted to harness this to draw people into their bodies, their senses, and the specificity of the environment that they come from. The soup was made with foraged seaweed from the Dublin coast and foraged wild vegetables from the NCAD field, I made a ramen from these ingredients as Japanese cultures holds food in very high esteem, and finds value in many of the ingredients Irish food culture ignores such as our seaweed.

animation screened at the Sculpture Banquet showing each individual piece of foraged vegetable that went into the soup

clip showing the journey involved in the foraging of the seaweed, exposing the class to the sensory connection to place involved in the process of making the soup