Food Bigger: Than The Plate

Food Bigger: Than The Plate

Flood: Bigger than the Plate

V&A, 2019

An exhibition about the politics, pleasures, and future of food.

Could we collectively build a food future that is more sustainable, fair and delicious than the one currently on offer? This exhibition brought together projects by over seventy artists and designers who are creatively addressing this question in collaboration with scientists, chefs and local communities. 

Organised in four sections – Composting, Farming, Trading and Eating – it took visitors on a journey through the food cycle, beginning with waste. The show culminated with an eating experience in which visitors could design and taste their own food future. 

Curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: May Rosenthal Sloan
Exhibition designer: Juri Nishi, V&A Design Studio
Graphic design: Judith Brugger 
Prop makers: Nick Sellek and Caroline Perry
Senior Exhibition Manager: Olivia Oldroyd

Witty, shocking and charmingly bonkers. When it comes to hard hitting arguments and radical ideas this show will cajole even the most ardent sceptics of environmentalism into engaging with them with an open mind

Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph

Quirky, surprising, beautiful, revolting, tasty, synthetic, thought-provoking, eye-brow raising but never, ever dull.

Mecca Ibrahim, Women in the Food Industry 

FOOD: Bigger than the Plate addresses the issues in a way that is subversive, humorous and wondrous… Its tantalising recipe of science and aesthetics is playfully didactic as it imagines endless possibilities of food futures as well as exploring the age-old relationship between culture and food

Kristina Foster, Culture Whisper

You’ll leave feeling blown away by the possibilities

Harriet Addison, The Times

In each room of Food: Bigger than the Plate we are reminded that food will always be a complex interplay of politics and pleasure. But the final call to arms here – and rightly, in my view – is to pleasure

Bee Wilson, Times Literary Supplement 

This is a show that will stick with you, encouraging you to interrogate why you eat what you do, rather than scarfing it down and getting back to work.

Tabish Khan, The Londonist

FOOD stretched the limits of traditional definitions of food, art, and design, and pushed the spatial boundaries between the kitchen, the laboratory, the dining room, the artist’s studio, and the museum space. 

Laura Eliza Enriquez, The Senses and Society (Routledge)

The viewer was not treated as a passive consumer, but rather hailed as a being who actively and constantly engages with reality via food and taste – in both senses of the term.

Laura Eliza Enriquez, The Senses and Society (Routledge)

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 Objects

Disobedient Objects

Disobedient Objects

V&A, 2014-15

An exhibition about the art and design of grassroots social movements.

Many of the rights and freedoms we enjoy today were won by disobedience. Activist social movements have changed our world from the grassroots up, popularising new ideas and values. The objects made as part of these movements have played a key role in those cultural and political changes, but have mostly been ignored by institutions of art and design. Looking beyond art and design framed by markets, connoisseurs and professionals, Disobedient Objects aimed to address this gap and tell a people’s history of art and design from below. Attracting over 400,000 visitors, it was, at the time, the most visited exhibition at the V&A since 1946. 

Find out more about the thinking behind Disobedient Objects in our introduction to the accompanying book

Co-curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: Gavin Grindon
Research Assistant: Steffi Duarte
2D Exhibition Design: Barnbrook Studio
3D Exhibition Design: Line Lund
Exhibition Manager: Sarah Jameson 

One of the most exhilarating and important exhibitions of the year

Zoe Pilger, The Independent

This isn’t protest art, it is protest itself and it’s refreshing to see objects with little financial value but massive potency exhibited a place like the V&A

Alex Dymoke, City A.M

A Welcome institutional shouldering of social responsibility in an irresponsible world

Catharine Rossi, Domus

A challenge has been laid down to us by the curators to see through the appearance of things, and to uncover the much more interesting secret life of grass roots democratic action bubbling just below the surface.

Adam Nathaniel Furman, Disegno

This is a brave and unusual exhibition

Martin Roth, form V&A Director

Disobedient Objects asks us to rethink what counts as both art and as politics…It shows real change can only come when the imagination challenges the institution – and wins.

Dr Anna Feigenbaum, Bournemouth University

This fiery survey of protest objects made by grassroots social movements – staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum, of all places – is a rebel yell from the heart of the establishment.

Skye Sherwin, The Guardian

Disobedient Objects breaks all the rules of a traditional art exhibition. It invites a radical reality into the the museum, giving centre stage to the objects that people use to rebel against the system. Visitors should expect to be shocked and inspired by what they see. 

Vashti Hallissey, PSFK 

Disobedient Objects has to be the most exciting, dynamic and emotive exhibition I’ve seen at the V&A

– Victoria Sadler, Huffington Post