Curator Isabel de Vasconcellos talks about Nadege Meriau’s exhibition, and Global Feast’s takeover of Stratford Old Town Hall

When I arrived at Stratford Old Town Hall on Tuesday morning for the installation of Nadege Meriau’s exhibition, it was as though the building had been taken over by Global Feast.

Heading out to the carpark to meet Nadege and her assistant Jimmy, I was pleased to see that the marquee had gone up in the courtyard since my last visit. Upstairs in the ballroom, Alex Haw, Kerstin Rodgers and an assortment of gorgeous creatures were disporting themselves with impressive abandon on the North American section of the Worldscape table, as photographer Jonathan Perugia snapped about them with his camera. It felt particularly exciting to begin hanging Nadege’s work, with the whole building so abuzz with the project.

Nadege is a French artist who works with edible materials, taking us within them, into mysterious, enclosed spaces that feel like caves, grottoes or primordial dwellings. Using a large format camera, the artist burrows like a worm inside bread and fruit, drawing the viewer in with intimations of shelter and cosiness. Yet the more you look at them, the more they reveal an unsettling ambiguity: there is a moist fleshliness about them, so that no sooner have you succumbed to the fascination of their sublime painterliness, then you sense a kind of peril and uncertainty. Is this geology, architecture, or laporoscopy? Are we inhabiting, sheltered, or ingested? Or, in feeling attracted to these intimate spaces, are we perhaps experiencing a longing for our first home, the womb?

When I started working on Global Feast, I was really keen to include a visual arts component in the project. Something that would draw together notions of consuming and inhabiting; of how we make the world and are made by it. Another provocation to conversation and thought amongst the people who will join us on the twenty nights, meeting and eating their way across continents and cultures. I was delighted to discover Nadege’s work just around that time, and that she has agreed to lend four wonderful photographs to us.

The exhibition is also a good excuse to explore the Old Town Hall building itself. Built in 1869 in Italian Gothic style, and designed by Lewis Angell and John Giles (who also designed the grand Langham Hotel in Portland Place), it is a monument to civic pomp, all baroque staircases, marble floors, and lashings of gold.

Nadege’s star is on the rise. She is nominated for this year’s Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, and there are other exciting announcements in the pipeline. The works look resplendent in the civic grandeur of the Side Foyer, so head across and visit them when you come to Global Feast!

 

Nadege will be our guest speaker on the Mediterranean night, Thursday 26 July 2012.

www.nadegemeriau.com

[Installation snaps by Isabel]