Yesterday we went for a walk around Dennings Point with our good friend Katie who showed Gryffin how to pick wild wine rasberries. Katie, a raw food chef and owner of Sweet Mama's, asked me about my ideas for this project, and in talking with her I realized that I want to articulate the journey I've travelled this past year which has led me towards working with the ideas of the self and community.

The short albeit arrogant sounding answer is both simple and profound: I can (call it that) because I am (and I'm an artist). I could also argue here that I'm an artist because I call myself one, but that's getting into another discussion.  The long answer is something I hope to both demonstrate and flush out through this blog, my art and pedagogical research and through the dialogue that is created and exchanged both during and after each Sunday dinner event.

Nicolas Bourriaud famous for coining (and writing his book about) the term “relational aesthetics” (or relational art), wrote in the 1990's that "...the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist." I like the idea “ways of living” as if, here through my work, through this practice, I am creating a preferred way of life for myself. And as an artist who is also an art educator, I am beginning to see all of my creative, that is to say 'creating' acts as part of my practice as an artist. Through my experiences at Goldsmiths, (internationally known for it's progressive art school) and through the work of artists I continue to explore like Andrea Zittel, Rirkrit Tiravanija,  and Fritz Haeg I feel contemporary art has given me this licence to realize that for the past decade, my art work has been and is a pedagogical community practice. I will go into more about this in coming posts, but in general, I've realized that although I've continued to create work in fine art photography and design, more of my creative time over the past few years has been spent making connections to and with other artists in a variety of ways including developing artist groups, community art projects and events. Each of these connections have included teaching and learning where I have acted as facilitator and have co-created learning spaces for artists and the public.

With this project, I'm focusing on the idea of sharing good food and recreating a sense of familial community with those I call dear friends, while at the same time looking at how these dinners which represent and actualize my connection to others are also a realization of my self. It is a very personal project and it brings up many questions I want to explore such as:

Who am I? 

What is art?

What is community?

and where am I positioned within all of this as an artist-teacher-researcher-writer?

I grew up next door to my grandparent's house--the house in which my mother grew up with her five brother's and sisters. [Pictured here is an old photo with my grandfather on a lounge chair and grandmother standing in the background in the doorway].  Nanna and Pop Pop had a long history of making their house a home for our extended family and I enjoyed every major holiday and many Sunday dinners with aunts, uncles and cousins around the dinner table. The adults sat in the living room and a card table was added to the dining room table for a 'kids table'. Each meal usually consisted of the same basic thing—homemade pasta, sauce and meatballs with a side of baked chicken pieces. On special occasions a birthday girl or boy could request ravioli's which were my grandmother's specialty. She made them quite large in a square so as to not waste any bit of dough and they were so soft they almost melted in your mouth. Her meatballs were the same and I used to love to watch her cook in the kitchen. She'd let me help roll out the dough in long 'worms' and then feed it into the cavatelli grinder to make the little canoe shapes that she pronounced 'cava-teels'. 

There would always be a few small pieces of dough left at the end of each 'worm' and these were put aside for Pop Pop. He would come in and with his two large soft fingers he'd pull the pieces into a handmade canoe shape and if you were lucky you'd get one or two of these in your bowl which of course tasted the best. These gatherings were my first experience of community and looking back now I think I have searched to recreate them in every group I've been a part of. Why were they so special to me and how can a gathering over food create a community with others are just two of the questions I'm looking to answer with this project. But more on my reasons later. 

For now, I've decided to kick off this series of dinners with an homage to my Nanna, and although my cavatils came from a bag (frozen but Italian) I did make her sauce and meatballs recipe and we shared it with our extended family/good friends 'Uncles' Matt and Dan and Gryffin's half sister Beckett.

As usual I made the sauce using the Hunt's tomato sauce as a base (the darkest and richest can brand that my grandmother found to be comparable to what she had in Italy). Also as usual, as a nod to my grandfather, Pop Pop, I made one larger egg shaped meatball as Nanna used to do to denote that it was the one for him with the raisins in it. And for the first time, I added a can of crushed tomatoes to make the sauce a bit chunkier, and also for the first time I made little tiny meatballs for Gryffin and Beckett. The meal was both a gift to my loved ones but also a self welcome home of true comfort food.