The second 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
​Over the past twelve months, chef Kawther Luay has been in residence at Deveron Projects, 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 has 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 have 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 has 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 takes the form of a meal, in which cultured, curdled, and fermented characters will collide at different points in their existence, transformed through time, technique and the elements. The acts will be 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 has 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 draws 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 2: Grain
Act 2 introduced Grain, our second character in this three act series, in the form of barley. Growing barley has shaped the landscape in Aberdeenshire, and local diets. From malting whisky to feeding cattle, barley remains central to cereal production in the North East and the region’s role in Scottish commerce.
Over the course(s) of this meal, barley interacted with koji, a Japanese cooked rice that has been inoculated with a fermentation culture, Aspergillus Oryzae. As an active agent in a fermentation process, koji enables transformation and transmutation. How will koji transform the characters in this story? What forms, flavours, smells and relationships will emerge?
Taking place next to a newly planted barley field in the Cabrach, we traced sea trade routes through food, encountering seaweed from the shore before moving inland to sites of grain production, bringing wild and foraged ingredients with us along the way. Coming together, these characters/ingredients told the story of exchange and trade that has taken place here in Aberdeenshire, from the settlement of the Picts at Rhynie to present day.
This event weaved together these narratives of migration and exchange with the preservation techniques that have enabled the movement of food cultures around the world. Fermenting, salting, even drying food cultures into cloth – these techniques have enabled cultures – both human and non-human – to survive through time, trade and migration. Collectively, alongside the meal, we weaved together wild materials steeped in our food cultures, to preserve for the final act – Clay.
About the project
This event is a part of The Gathering Table, a project with chef and artist Kawther Luay. The project explores 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 is a part of The Gathering Table, a project with chef and artist Kawther Luay. The project explores 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.
