Lindsay Kelley - Visiting Artist

Lindsay Kelley — Baking Strange

Lindsay Kelley is a visiting scholar with the Science and Justice Research Center. She works with food and eating as sculptural and social art forms. Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design, College of the Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University, and she holds a MFA in Digital Art & New Media and a PhD in the History of Consciousness, both from the University of California Santa Cruz. She has written two books, Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience and forthcoming from MIT Press, After Eating: Metabolizing the Arts.

 

What exactly do we eat when we eat a biscuit? Everyday objects like biscuits contain unexpected, dense connections that illuminate material and cultural networks. Thousands of years before biscuits could be purchased in packets from the grocery store, twice-baked breads circulated as military rations. When we eat biscuits, we digest their military ration predecessors with each mouthful. Their ingredients have commemorative significance and may function as reenactments of specific military contexts. Using taste and recipe formats as key methods, the multiyear research initiative Tasting History involves diverse publics in experiences of tasting and eating together. 

Baking Strange seeks to defamiliarize the Anzac biscuit recipe literature and its methods. Included works emerge from archival research at the Australian War Memorial and participatory taste workshops conducted by the artist in collaboration with the Kandos branch of the Country Women’s Association, Cementa, Inc, and editor and videographer David Ryan. Loaned tins and research ephemera document the ongoing multiyear research project Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture, and National Identity.

This work was produced on unceded Gadigal-Bidjigal, Ngunnawal-Ngambri, Wiradjuri, and Cabrogal land. Research was conducted in compliance with UNSW Human Research Ethics protocol HC190344, now Australian National University Human Research Ethics protocol 2022/478. 

Aftertaste will run from April-August 2023 at Fairfield City Museum & Gallery. There will be a biscuit baking workshop in July. (https://www.fcmg.nsw.gov.au/Home)