The third of three final meals, as part of Kawther Luay’s project The Gathering Table.
The Gathering Table: in three acts
Act 1: Milk Sunday 14th May, 5-7.30pm, Tap o’ Noth Farm, Rhynie, AB54 4HH
Act 2: Grain Sunday 4th June, 3-5.30pm, ‘Old Smiddy’ (Cabrach Trust), Inverharroch, Lower Cabrach. AB54 4EU
Act 3: Clay Sunday 2nd July, 1-4pm, Greenmyres Eco Bothy, Drumblade, Huntly AB54 6AG
​Chef Kawther Luay was in residence at Deveron Projects for twelve months, developing a project called The Gathering Table. Initially setting out to explore local materials and ingredients around Huntly through foraging, cooking, crafting and eating, the project made connections and fostered collaborations with people, species and cultures (human and more-than-human*), to explore the politics of food and hospitality.
From practical workshops and regular foraging walks, to experimental meals that play with guests’ expectations, the collaborations nurtured by The Gathering Table unpicked traditional power dynamics between the artist and their audience, the chef and their ingredients, the forager and the plants they have come to know. In performing these multiple roles throughout the project, Kawther created the conditions for active collaboration and agency, enabling the audience to engage as host, and the ingredients to transform and tell their stories of how they came to be known (or hidden) here in Huntly.
To culminate the project, Kawther, with her human and more-than-human collaborators, devised a story in three acts, to play out across the final three months of her residency. Each act took the form of a meal, in which cultured, curdled, and fermented characters collided at different points in their existence, transformed through time, technique and the elements. The acts were performed close to the characters’ respective homes – the fields in which barley is grown to the riverbed where clay is formed.
Central to the meals, a collaboration with artist Fionn Duffy created a series of functional ceramics from River Bogie clay, including a cheese mould, yoghurt pot, butter churn and dairy bowl. The form of each object drew from Fionn and Kawther’s initial research into food histories in the area, including at Rhynie and in the Cabrach. The ceramics will be used in the preparation, serving and preservation of each meal, as the hosts of new food cultures (human, microbial, bacterial, fungal) and underpinning the transformation that will take place through each act.
*more-than-human is an idea that recognises that the non-human world has its own capacities and powers, beyond and including those of the human world.
Act 3: Clay
The final act (Clay) drew together cheese, yogurt, koji and sourdough cultures in a celebratory earth oven* feast. Incorporating wild clay gathered from Sandend and the river Bogie into her stoneware, artist Fionn Duffy had created a collection of vessels for the final meal to be offered into the fire and earth. Cooking the meal directly on glowing hot bisque fired vessels and burning embers, Kawther Luay drew to a close the cultures that had given rise to relationships, dishes and stories drawn out over the previous three months.
With the focus on wild clay, ceramic vessels were fired alongside food prepared by Kawther, unearthed in time to share a meal altogether. In this event, the fire pit, built for this meal and inspired by earth oven cooking*, allowed us to visualise the relationship between craft and food explored throughout the project and specifically through these three events. Participants were then invited to shape clay foraged in the nearby River Bogie, working with ceramicist Fionn Duffy to make clay fire offerings to the kiln gods, before being placed in the earth oven.
Reflecting on all of the related events, the artists, with guests, explored the project’s questions around gathering wild materials in contemporary society, the relationship to Huntly and our histories, and the politics of food and coming together around a dinner table. Ultimately, Fionn and Kawther were asking when this meal begun: was it when the food went into the fire? When the fire pit was built? When we collected the clay from the riverbed? When the riverbed formed? And, in the same light, when does the meal end, if we are all to take away knowledge, or even objects, from the event?
* For this meal, Kawther will be taking inspiration and learning from the Indigenous and ancestral technique of earth oven cooking. This method has been invented and used world over in many different forms by Indigenous peoples – we’re grateful to the gardeners of the Yucatán based hacienda in Mexico who shared and taught this practice of cooking with the earth to Kawther.
About the project
This event was a part of The Gathering Table, a project with chef and artist Kawther Luay. The project explored foraging, food and craft through a lens of care and hospitality, with Kawther leading public foraging walks, meals, reopening the Barter Shop and inviting many other practitioners to share their skills and knowledge.
This event was a part of The Gathering Table, a project with chef and artist Kawther Luay. The project explored foraging, food and craft through a lens of care and hospitality, with Kawther leading public foraging walks, meals, reopening the Barter Shop and inviting many other practitioners to share their skills and knowledge.
Food is lowered into the fire pit; photo: Jassy Earl
Artist Kawther Luay performs; photo: Jassy Earl
The Gathering Table; photo: Jassy Earl
Artist Fionn Duffy presents clay and invites participants to make fire offerings; photo: Jassy Earl
Food is served; photo: Jassy Earl
