Tastes Like Home

An illustrated exhibition about food sharing, for the RAMM Museum

Apr 21, 2025

Welcome back to The Slow Burner after a hiatus!

It’s been a while since my last Substack Newsletter on The Slow Burner - it’s been a year of significant re-configuration in my life, and sometimes while big changes are happening, it’s difficult to stop and reflect, before diving straight into the next piece of work. I’ve just crossed the threshold of my first year working full-time freelance as an artist; it’s been a year full of possibility and freedom, but also lots of challenges, learning and adaptation. I’ve been working on some fantastic projects and I’m really looking forward to sharing them, as well as some reflections on what it’s like working as an artist in the intersection of illustration, research and facilitation.

A few weeks ago I was on-site with the team at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in central Exeter to install my artwork for the Tastes Like Home exhibition, which is now open, and will be up at RAMM in the downstairs cafe/community space for a year (until March 2026).

view of the exhibition from the first floor balcony

I worked with Ruth Gidley at RAMM to create an exhibition concept that could bring to life attitudes and memories about food, gathered by interviewing people from in and around Exeter.

“The large-scale hangings around the Cafe at RAMM evoke the smells of weekly baking, sounds of South Indian cooking, tastes of holiday treats, the delight of childhood picnics, and a reverence for unused teacups. Project participants responded to feelings and flavours behind food-related artefacts, from stone handaxes, silver chocolate pots and Devon harvest jugs.
Participants – from Alphington, Beacon Heath, Countess Wear, Newtown, Summerway, St Thomas, Whipton and Wonford – talked during craft activities, community festivals and museum visits. In every neighbourhood there was a surge of resourceful communities and ethical entrepreneurs rejecting waste and isolation, choosing instead to share meals, gardens and seasonal celebrations.”

I love working with real speech from interviews, so my starting point for creating artwork for Tastes Like Home was to read through the transcribed conversations with residents, and identify interesting phrases and images, and imagine how these might translate into a visual language. I then extracted vignettes from these conversations and wove them into a series of illustrated panels that explore memories and impressions of eating, cooking, sharing food and seasonality.

In these panels, an intrigued pigeon enters a house, drawn in by stories about food. They wander through the house and into a garden, following unspooling narrative threads that illuminate memories, sensations, smells, ingredients and habits.

I felt like the pigeon could be a figure that embodies curiosity about food and people’s habits, as pigeons are naturally curious. At the same time the pigeon reads as an outsider who is being invited into a new space, learning about other people’s cultures around food, and this felt poignant in its sense of solitude and vulnerability, something that perhaps we can relate to if we have had experience of integrating with new communities, leaving our families or moving house - connecting the experience of food with our experience of what ‘home’ means in different contexts.