Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food

Food is a survey exhibition of the work of Lucy + Jorge Orta at the City Gallery and Museum in Peterborough. It showcases their interest in food over a twenty years specifically related to how and where food is grown and distributed, species loss, food waste and security.

The exhibition features two new commissions 'Bread' and 'Seeds'. For Bread, Orta sourced antique wooden agricultural tools to form the basis of a sculpture and cast the loaves baked by the Peterborough community in aluminium to preserve their memory. The humble objects from rural origins, cross cultures and centuries were a reminder of the ancestral act of making, of hand-sculpting wood and dough to create unique manifestations of human needs. Seeds are 31 larger-than-life blown-glass seeds that Lucy Orta made with Venetian glassblowers. Seeds is set against a backdrop of watercolour drawings that emphasise the intricate beauty and diversity of our natural world. The curatorial narrative reflects on Orta's practice as an act of 'conservation', drawing new light on species, traditions and cultures that are threatened.

The exhibition also included archival work from ‘All in One Basket’ (1996); ‘HortiRecycling Enterprise’ (1999), and for the first time on exhibition, the entire collection of limited edition Royal Limoges porcelain plates from the ‘70 x 7’ series, alongside a series of bespoke silk-jacquard table runners, woven by Suffolk weavers.

The exhibition marks the culmination of an 18-month residency with the arts organisation Metal Peterborough. In September 2015, Lucy + Jorge staged 70 x 7 The Meal, Act XXXIX Peterborough for the weekend-long Harvest Festival. This was the first major UK outdoor meal in this ongoing series, seating over 500 local residents for a lunch of locally sourced produce.

The exhibition was accompanied by a hard-back publication ‘Lucy + Jorge Orta: Food and the Public Sphere’ (Black Dog Publishing, London 2016), with contributors including Hou Hanru, Nigel Prince and Ellen Lupton.

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• http://www.metalculture.com/projects/luc...