read about the kitchen
My morning starts with a cup of coffee that breathes life into my creative mind. It wakes it up into its fresh aroma and acidy, into the chorus of birdsongs, and into the warming sunlight. In the welcoming world, and in experiencing the subtle changes of the flavours as it cools down, I prepare myself to return to work, artmaking. The flavours are an experience of transience, which emerges in different times as different forms throughout a day.
My day ends in the kitchen. The calmness of being in the kitchen is a remedy for my brain that has overworked. Tangible moments of cooking pass in the transience of changing colours of the sky, where the sun slides into the horizon. Feeling physical tiredness, but awakened by the colours, textures, and scents of ingredients, I cook dinner in the deepening darkness. While stewing, I take a seat on a stool and look outside of the window. I listen to the sounds of the boiling pot echoing in the silence of the air in the room. In such a nameless moment of those hours, an in-between moment, the tangibility brings me back to the here and now of the kitchen from the studio: abstract concepts, details and issues, and repeated imaginaries. In the darkening natural light, my body recovers the connection to itself, recognising the colours of vegetables, the cutting sounds, and the familiar wooden textures of tools. I recognise the scent from the pot, gradually developing its shape.
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The passing of time perceived through cooking, the scents that travel into the room, and the textures of food that are experienced in my mouth. As an artist, these experiences are physically and creatively vital to me for nourishment. The kitchen is essential to my living and the house (AH+).
Most of the ingredients I use are locally harvested. Grown in the air, water, and sunlight local to myself, those ingredients establish my relations to the community and seasonal appreciation of the land. This locality forms a tangibility and stands out when much work is done online and internationally. Encompassing both the intangible digital work life and the tangible local living, the house harmonises the two by creative means.
The little harvests from the garden add fresh colours to the lively spirit of the kitchen. Table bouquets accompany solitary eating. Activated by the colours, textures, and scents of ingredients and the garden, my creativity imagines how the nourishment for body and mind would look and taste like. What I do in the kitchen returns to myself. The kitchen is a wholesome and rich intersection of living, and is a second studio for me.
In such a circulation of creativity, the colours, textures, and scents; the senses associated with cooking, food, and plants, are central to my creative writing. It shapes a writing subject based on those moments that nurture me, in which I unwind and idle, feel and dream, and am undefined and free.
Salad, acrostic poem
Hello from the wild
Driving home
Snow evaporated into the air on a late winter day of March. I was driving. The stunning landscape inspired me to cook and make a video work when I came back home.
Chicken breast, turnips, oat meal, and yoghurt
The Shoulder of Mist