Urban Mushroom Farm

Urban Mushroom Farm

Urban Mushroom Farm 

V&A, 2019

A fully working mushroom farm installed in a V&A gallery where delicious oyster mushrooms grew on used coffee grounds from the museum cafe.

During the exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate, we grew oyster mushrooms in the gallery using a substrate of spent coffee grounds from the nearby V&A cafe, where visitors consume over 1000 cups of coffee a day. When they fruited, the mushrooms were harvested and returned to the cafe as ingredients, closing the nutrient loop.

Coffee grounds are rich in nutrients, but most end up in landfill. Using them to grow mushrooms is a small but smart step towards farming in the concrete jungle, taking waste from cities that are overflowing with coffee, but where soil is thin on the ground. The installation intervened in the museum’s own cycles of consumption and waste to show urban farming and the circular economy in action. 

Curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: May Rosenthal Sloan
Designers and Builders: GroCycle

Images copyright V&A

A interview with Catherine Flood produced by the V&A, 2019

Food Rules Tomorrow

Food Rules Tomorrow

Food Rules Tomorrow

V&A, 2019

A series of short films in which artists Honey & Bunny dine disruptively in locations around the V&A and test the boundaries of our eating behaviours. 

No other part of our lives (with the possible exception of sex) is as ritualised as eating. Table manners are deeply rooted in culture and tradition and any deviation from the norm can feel outrageous. By playfully unlearning the rules that determine what we eat, where and how, Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter  – aka Honey & Bunny – question the eating behaviours we adhere to and their impact on social processes, economies and ecosystems. 

As a carefully regulated environment in its own right, and a museum filled with stories of consumption, the V&A provided a rich setting for Honey & Bunny to film a series of provocative new dining rituals. The films were shown in the exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate.

Curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: May Rosenthal Sloan
Artists: Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter

Images copyright Honey & Bunny

Fruits From the Garden and the Field

Fruits From the Garden and the Field

Fruits From the Garden and Field

V&A, 2019

A twelve-metre squared custom wallpaper linking the V&A collections, the horticultural history of the museum site and the future of the city.

Artists David Burns and Austin Young, known collectively as Fallen Fruit, make public art that explores the role of fruit in creating shared culture. For the Food exhibition at the V&A, we worked with them to produce a piece responding to the little-known fact that the land on which the museum stands was formerly a nursery that supplied fruit trees to gardens around the country.  The resulting wallpaper teeming with images of fruit and insects gleaned from the V&A prints collection invited visitors to reflect on fruit as a cultural object and on the museum’s collections as a form of abundance.

For the second part of the commission they plotted the location of fruit trees growing in or overhanging public spaces in four London neighbourhoods from which communities can harvest fruit for free. These maps were a new iteration of  ‘The Endless Orchard’, Fallen Fruit’s global public artwork that encourages people to interact with their cities, and each other, in new ways.

Together the pattern and the maps issued a joyful call to re-imagine the city, its public spaces and institutions as generous and productive communal spaces where culture and agriculture might combine.

Curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: May Rosenthal Sloan
Artists: Fallen Fruit

Images copyright V&A and Fallen Fruit

©Catherine Flood, 2022

Disobedient How-Tos

Disobedient How-Tos

Disobedient How-To Guides

V&A, 2014

A series of step by step guides showing people how to make six of the objects in the Disobedient Objects exhibition.

Available to take away in the Disobedient Objects exhibition and download from the V&A website, these ‘how-to’ guides highlighted the status of disobedient objects as tools for action. They were inspired by the long tradition of social movements recording and sharing their design knowledge in pamphlets and guides for others to remake and modify, a process we termed ‘swarm design’. 

In August 2014 the V&A guide for making a tear-gas mask from a water bottle was shared and used by people protesting in Ferguson, Missouri, against the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. A month later, during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong students ran workshops using the guide to fabricate hundreds of masks that were handed out during street demonotarios to protect people from the effects of tear gas. As the use of tear gas as weapon of crowd control has escalated around the world, the guide has continued to circulate. 

Download the guides.

Curator: Catherine Flood
Curator: Gavin Grindon
Designer: Marwan Kaabour, Barnbrook Studio

Power to the People

Power to the People

Power to the People

Carrie Reichardt & the Treatment Rooms, 2014

An ceramic intervention on the  façade of the V&A 

Made in response to the exhibition Disobedient Objects this commission reflected the idea of a people’s history of art and design from below. It invited visitors, as they crossed the threshold of the museum, to consider activist social movements as an important part of our culture. 

Quotations inserted between the steps leading up to the main entrance represented the voices of activists and political thinkers, from 19th-century anarchist Emma Goldman to an anonymous slogan on a 1970s badge. On either side of the entrance, two ‘ceramic posters’ collaged together images of protest in Britain, past and present, including actions that Reichardt, her friends and family were involved in. They intentionally covered over an inscription commemorating the inauguration of the building by the ‘Empress and Emperor of India’ (Victoria and Albert). 

Curators: Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon
Artist: Carrie Reichardt
Makers: Treatment Rooms Collective

Images copyright V&A and Carrie Reichardt