ART AND FOOD - A Symposium

Hosted by the Dunedin School of Art and the programme in the Culinary Arts at the Otago Polytechnic and the Centre for Sustainability and Food Science, University of Otago
24August 2012

Call for Papers

Following three highly successful symposia held at the Dunedin School of Art (‘Illustrating the Unseeable: Reconnecting Art and Science’ (2009), ‘Art and Law’ (2010) and ‘Art and Medicine’ (2011)), the Dunedin School of Art and the School of Hospitality at the Otago Polytechnic and Food Science and the Centre for Sustainability at the University of Otago, are organising a further Symposium. This time the symposium will examine the relationship between food (including wine and other beverages) and the visual arts.

Art and food have always been intertwined: food features in the earliest artistic depictions of human endeavour; artistic expression and food rituals have been evident throughout human history; food is the subject of much of what we see in the domain of still life art, and; food itself can be an art form that literally becomes a part of us. This symposium explores this intertwining and how the very things that sustain us have become the subject of artistic expression. It is both a celebration of art and food and an interrogation of why we celebrate this unlikely marriage.
The Symposium will address the themes listed below, but other contributions will also be considered as long as they are related to an interface between art, food and drink.

• The representation of food, such as the still-life
• The celebration of food
• Food as symbol
• The promotion of food – photography, advertising, shop signs
• Food and plenty – cornucopia, Archimboldo
• Art and haute cuisine
• Food and the body – flesh and form
• Food, wine and folly – images of Bacchus
• Food and the Pastoral

This is an invitation to attend this symposium and also a call for papers, artworks, performance, or any other form of presentation or participation, from those engaged with the arts and food and drink - as artists, art historians or theorists, teachers and cultural workers, as growers, processors, chefs/cooks, restaurateurs, food technologists, food scientists, academics and educators in the worlds of food and drink.

Staff, students and members of the public are also welcome to attend.

Expressions of interest and abstracts of potential papers or other contributions, together with brief bios, should be submitted in the first instance to peter.stupples@op.ac.nz by 1 April 2012.