Ambiguous Implements

Title: Objects and Food in dialogue/abstract:
Clooney and Colley are cross-disciplinary artists working in the applied arts and beyond, into fine art. In the form of collaborative duo By|With|By they create immersive, interactive presentations of their respective ambiguous eating implements, inviting audiences to engage in the known ritualistic aspects of a shared meal. The aim being that through these ambiguous artefacts the audience will rediscover tactile and sensual pleasures that might, in turn, end the meal in an intimate, internalized dialogue. As the meal goes from full to empty, bellies empty to full, people congregate and segregate. Objects that were once clean are now dirty. The focus shifts to the discarded implements, the disorder of the table, the remnants.
In Feeding Desire, Caroline C Young explains that “In the west cutlery transforms the animal act of feeding into the refined, human ritual of dining.” But what if this is subverted and the implements that you have in your hand requires you to experience food in a more physical, tactile and sensual way? If the implements in which we use to eat and share food are more engagingly tactile, then what happens to the art of conversation at the dinner table? We are investigating how dialogue manifests itself in physical actions; words become slurps, gestures and are ingested. In this chapter we will analyse and discuss our collaborative practice through image-based visual observation of the physical dialogue that manifests itself in the participant's actions and gestures. Through the use of bespoke ambiguous eating implements the user is encouraged to examine how taste is connected to our emotional experience.

Keywords: objects, food, dialogue, physicality, tactility, emotional experience