A Festival of the Mind 2024 Project
Give feedback on your visit to the project space.
Inspired by Meredith Warren’s research on food’s transformative effects in literature, this project invites visitors to consider how food and taste affect us through sensory experience, memories, nostalgia, and community. Warren’s research, published in the book Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (2019), identifies a type of eating found in ancient texts where eaters are transformed by what they eat. Like Alice’s adventure down the rabbit hole, eating and drinking other-wordly foods can open doors to other realms. Often found in biblical texts, such as Eve’s fruit in the Garden of Eden, or the little scroll in the Book of Revelation, transformative food can change a persons appearance, grant them access to knowledge or transport them to new worlds. The exhibit invites visitors from all walks of life to reflect on how food transports us across space, culture and time.
This project, in partnership with Ignite Imaginations, showcases artwork from a diverse range of communities, including work from Roshni, Parsons Cross Forum, City of Sanctuary and Sheffcare. A series of artistic workshops were held in summer 2024, led by artists Laura Page and Lucy Marriott, where adults from across the Sheffield area learned about Warren’s research and incorporated it into art reflecting their own experiences with food, meals, and the sense of taste. Artworks reflect artists’ associations with food–whether memories of favourite foods from back home, another country, or another stage of life.
Eating and tasting are everywhere in our culture: metaphors of flavours garnish our conversations: melodies are sweet; memories are bitter; we are left with a bad taste in our mouths. Taste and food inform how we relate to each other, our cultures, our homes, and our memories. Stop by Perisistence Works during the Festival of the Mind, and enter into our dining room to become transformed by memories, stories, and art engaging human connections with food.
Watch a short video outlining Meredith Warren’s research.