THE DOMESTIC GODLESS: The food, the bad & the ugly

Crawford Art Gallery is delighted to present a three week-residency, performances and exhibition by THE DOMESTIC GODLESS.

The world has witnessed a gastronomic renaissance over the past fifteen years, during which time the act of eating has become a matrix of entertainment, politics, and lifestyle choices. At the same time the mass media is populated with celebrity chefs and food pornography, thereby creating a discombobulated consumer.

While all was changing, THE DOMESTIC GODLESS maintained their distance, inhabiting a twilight zone between art and gastronomy. But THE DOMESTIC GODLESS are not chefs. However, they exploit food as material to irritate notions of good taste, function, and morality, while acknowledging its complex relationship with our biological well-being and our cultural civilization. Their practice includes performance, installations, drawing, photography, sound, video, public presentations, writing, pseudo-theory and recipes, that renegotiates the way food can be experienced—as object and substance—through the rituals by which it is consumed, and playing with the idea that we do not just eat. They employ the taste of food, its presentation, its history and cultural values as material for subversion through nuance, sensory perception, semantics and humour.

THE DOMESTIC GODLESS have introduced to their performances recipes such as Sea Urchin Pot Noodle, Carpaccio of Giant African Land Snail, Chilli-Chocolate Songbird Hearts and Foot & Mouth Terrine, often presented within the context of re-appropriated objects and installations. One such performance, inspired by bitter sweet memories of miserable summer holidays, Canaliculus Pergamentorum (2015-16), saw the group create a 30 metre canal of sewage ducting upon which travelled an array of dishes foraged from the coastal waters of Ireland.

THE DOMESTIC GODLESS three-week residency and performances in the Crawford Art Gallery, and the subsequent touring programme in 2018, will bring their specially constructed kitchen to galleries throughout Ireland. Under their misguidance, locally sourced and seemingly banal produce becomes strange and repulsive, or perhaps exotic and curious.

THE DOMESTIC GODLESS will invite guest artists, chefs, philosophers, foragers, writers and audiences to participate in creating food alchemy. Workshops will be presented to teachers and students from local schools and communities and ticketed brunches, lunches and evening performances will take place throughout the tour. The tour will also showcase the publication of their book, The food, the bad & the ugly, which includes recipes, stories, photographs and illustrations collected since 2003.

Touring venues: Galway Arts Centre partnering Galway Arts Festival; Callan Union Workhouse; Solstice Arts Centre, Navan; Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny partnering Perspective Festival and Uillin Arts Centre, Skibbereen. The touring programme is funded by the Arts Council Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme.

For futher details of dates and performances: www.crawfordartgallery.ie

About the artists
THE DOMESTIC GODLESS was founded by artists Stephen Brandes, Irene Murphy and Mick O’Shea under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition Artists/Groups at The Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2003. Recent projects include: Invasive Pests: Waiting for the Barbarians, Athens Biennale (2017); A Gastronomic Evening of Invasive pests: Future Feasting at The Science Gallery, Dublin (2016); Irish Breakfast Re-Invented, Appetite for Design at The National Design Gallery, Kilkenny; and Summer Rising: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015).

About the Crawford Art Gallery
Crawford Art Gallery is a National Cultural Institution based in the heart of Cork City. Through temporary exhibitions, learn & explore programmes and its expansive collection, the Crawford Art Gallery is committed to fostering recognition, critical assessment, and acknowledgement of historical and contemporary Irish and international art practice.