Sustainable Exhibition Design: Educating Through Eco-Friendly Practices

THETA (The Higher Education Technology Agenda) Conference Winds of Change, Perth, WA; 26 May 2025
↳ Audience Favourite Presentation Award; Richard D’Avigdor Conference Award 2024.

Abstract: UNSW Library’s Exhibitions Program, launched in 2017, collaborates with partners across the university to develop and stage exhibitions that highlight diverse research outcomes and collections. Exhibitions serve as powerful educational tools by providing interactive and engaging ways to present information and allowing students to engage with content in a hands-on manner. The Exhibitions Program establishes the Library as a cultural centre point on campus where students, researchers, and the broader community can connect. It is also an opportunity for students to encounter leading research and ideas outside their nominated disciplines.

In 2025, UNSW Library will present an exhibition developed with the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) to showcase Professor Veena Sahajwalla’s research that revolutionises recycling science and contributes to a more sustainable future. SMaRT technologies, including Green Steel and Green Ceramics, foster sustainable manufacturing practices and contribute to a circular economy. The exhibition will foreground SMaRT’s research and highly collaborative practical solutions that reframe thinking about waste to recognise the value in materials that were once discarded but can be re-manufactured into new products.

Our approach towards delivering an exhibition that educates audiences about recycling science and sustainability involves using eco-friendly materials, such as reclaimed or upcycled items, and recyclable products to minimise our environmental impact. While we regularly reuse frames and other display assets previously saved from becoming waste, we are exploring new ways of locally manufacturing didactic panels with materials utilised by SMaRT that can recycled at the show’s close. By adopting and integrating these strategies as a core component of the exhibition, we can reduce our carbon footprint while educating audiences about sustainable practices through demonstrable, real-world applications. 

UNSW Library’s engagement program for Care is a relationship was recognised with a Highly Commended Award at Museums & Galleries of NSW IMAGinE Awards 2024.

M&G NSW IMAGinE Awards 2024:

• IMAGinE Awards catalogue
• IMAGinE Awards winners
• IMAGinE Awards nominee
• Library team with award
• UNSW Library website
• Crafting Care Workshop series

< UNSW Library 2024 award

For the 2023 exhibition, Care is a relationship, UNSW Library worked in collaboration with Black Dog Institute and SPHERE to host a series of 3 workshops facilitated by artist-in-residence, Michele Elliot, that explored ideas of care and caregiving through craft. Work created in the sessions formed part of the collaborative artwork A Cloak of Care that evolved throughout the exhibition. In addition, there was a dedicated makerspace set up in the gallery where students could drop-in and participate at any time during Library opening hours. 

Project Team:

Michele Elliot, Artist-in-Residence
Jane Eliasson, Visual Communications & Publications Coordinator, UNSW Library
Megan R. Fizell, Curator, Special Collections & Exhibitions, UNSW Library
Jane Knowles, Associate Director, Research Collections and Exhibitions, UNSW Library
Emily Morandini, Exhibitions Coordinator, UNSW Library
Priya Vaughan, Post Doctoral Fellow, Black Dog Institute
Chloe Watfern, Policy Post Doctoral Fellow, Black Dog Institute

From Science to Art: Interdisciplinary Exhibitions at UNSW Library

ArlisANZ (Arts Libraries Society / Australia and New Zealand) 2024 Conference BEING SEEN, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney; 28 November 2024

Abstract: UNSW Library’s Exhibitions Program establishes the Library as a cultural centre point on campus where students, researchers, and the broader community intersect. It is also an opportunity for students to encounter leading research and ideas outside their nominated disciplines. 

This presentation will cover three recent exhibitions at UNSW Library, namely Sonus Maris (2023), Care is a relationship (2023) and Living Water (2024). These exhibitions draw on collaborative exhibition development and design methods to produce engaging multidisciplinary projects. UNSW’s key research outcomes address global challenges in fields like biomedical sciences, environmental sustainability, advanced materials, and social policy. We demonstrate how the Library’s Exhibitions Program gives visibility to this work by showcasing research that fuses art, science, and engineering through multisensory displays and related public programs such as talks, workshops, and object-based learning sessions. These collaborative exhibitions reconceptualise research by partnering with academics, creatives, and communities, making content accessible to a broader audience and creating connections between people, disciplines, and faculties across campus.

This project experiments with synaesthetic writing to test the potential of language to express the perceptual qualities present in multisensory art encounters.(1) Following the increased reliance on web-based media to present contemporary art during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project responds to the growing demand to develop and expand the ways institutions represent and describe artworks online. 

I began thinking about the sensory information omitted from web-based documentation of artworks in 2021 after seeing photographs of two scented artworks. First is a photograph of artist and curator Eleanor Zurwoski’s collaborative work That Feeling of Being Kneaded (2019) in the exhibition materials for A call to rise (2021) at Firstdraft, Gadigal land/Sydney.(2) Zurwoski’s installation includes a jar containing a live, 14-year-old sourdough starter. Having spent the previous year nurturing my own starter throughout successive COVID-19 lockdowns, memories from my own lived experience supplied the sour yeasty smell that was sure to accompany the installation. In this instance, my sense of sight intercommunicated with my sense of smell to furnish the missing sensory aspects of the artwork, thus highlighting the important role memory plays in perception. 

Second is artist Brydie Greedy’s MFA work in the 2021 Postgrad Show at the National Art School (NAS). The photograph posted by NAS depicts a white cloud suspended in the middle of a gallery space amongst curved stretched canvases.(3) The caption simply describes it as an immersive scent installation and notably omits details about the sensory experience of the work. I was left wondering what it smelled like and if it involved other sensory impressions when walking through the mist. Could you feel droplets on the skin? Did it feel wet or cold? Did the scent linger on the body throughout the rest of the day? Did the cloud billow and move, swirling around and away from bodies as audiences moved through the space? Or was the artwork largely invisible when near, like the way flying through clouds causes them to disappear?

With these questions in mind, I became curious to see if language could be used to convey the haptic, sonic, olfactory, and gustatory dimensions of art. Thinking about how a description of a meal can cause one’s mouth to salivate or how an image of food can invoke an impression of its taste, I set out to explore the potential of synaesthetic perception to produce cross-modal correspondences (or intercommunication) between the senses as a means to facilitate a deeper understanding of an object. Artists experimenting and exhibiting multisensory art expand the parameters of art beyond visual experience alone. The active participation required for the perception of sensory art practices configures the viewer as embodied; audiences are not merely seeing the artwork but tasting, touching, smelling, and sometimes hearing the materials that make up the work. 

I began by researching the application of creative language in audio descriptions to make images accessible to audiences who cannot visually perceive them. When drafting text to describe art for audiences who are blind, partially sighted, or who have low-vision, writers sometimes use similes and poetic language to draw comparisons and vivify the art forms. For example, by describing the colours of orange, yellow, or green as citrusy, one can get a sense of the brightness of the hue by correlating it with the acidic taste. Similarly, describing grey as smoky grey can evoke a multitude of sensations; the light brush of a wisp of smoke, the suffocating miasma of thick choaking smog, or the acrid smell of bushfires. Important to this form of descriptive language is the reader’s prior experience, if they do not have a sensory-related memory of a citrusy taste or smell of smoke, the expressive comparisons do not contribute toward their perception of the artwork.

The senses also have the potential to intercommunicate in a phenomenon is known as synaesthesia; a condition whereby the stimulation of one sense can involuntary trigger an unrelated sensory reaction. Philosopher André Abath makes a distinction between what he calls ‘synaesthesia proper’ and ‘sensory union’. To define synaesthesia proper, Abath cites the work of neurologist Richard Cytowic who describes the phenomenon as “the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine.”(4) Notable in this form of synaesthesia the arbitrariness of the sensory blending. There are no conventions or formulas to chart the sensory blendings of synaesthesia proper, each sensory linkage is unique to the individual.

Abath’s second form of synaesthesia, called ‘sensory union’, is a relatively commonplace occurrence. To describe sensory union, Abath gives examples of our tendency to correlate certain colours as warmer or cooler (a union between sight and touch) or the sound of words like ‘bouba’ or ‘kiki’ with rounded or jagged shapes respectively.(5) In the literary arts, this is known as linguistic or metaphorical synesthesia. By focusing on sensory language that speaks to the five human senses and by combining the descriptive words to generate synaesthetic pairings like ‘chilly gaze’ or ‘loud colour’, the following two case studies will seek to generate cross-sensory exchanges through the written descriptions.

Case Study 1: Monica Rani Rudhar, I Cook A Lot Of All These Foods (2022)

Sensory keywords: scratchy, cushioned, hushed, toasty, spicy, earthy, pristine, quiet, muted, symmetric, warm, astringent, camphoric, formal, soft, pale, homely, mottled, ornate, resplendent, spacious, tapering, triangular, stillness, static

Synaesthetic pairings: warm earthy (touch – smell), quiet formality (sound – vision), hushed softness (sound – touch), mottled perfume (vision – smell), gentle murmur (touch – sound) 

Audiences enter Monica Rani Rudhar’s full-room installation, I Cook A Lot Of All These Foods (2022), shoeless, the soles of their feet receptive to the texture and sensations of the stiff carpet fibres. A hushed softness blankets the room, the lace curtains admitting a diffused light and the gentle murmur of voices and sounds of food preparation filling the space. The polished wood furniture lends a quiet formality to the domestic scene, and the scent of toasted spices hangs in the air, the warm earthy smell forming a mottled perfume with the odour of mothballs.

Case Study 2: erincox and blackwd, Our bodies are the instruments (2022)*

* Notably, the artist statement for Our bodies are the instruments addresses the correlation between sound and shape: “Many of us relate sounds with shape and size, envisioning deep bass sounds with larger forms and high sharp sounds with slight.”(6)

Sensory keywords: tinkle, loud, cacophony, din, dissonance, echo, angular, radiating, rippling, shimmer, sparkly, harmonic, pinging, singing, vibrating, shifting, reverberation, strumming, throbbing, streaming, flowing, still, frozen 

Synaesthetic pairings: frozen pose (touch – vision), shimmering harmonies (vision – sound), rippling dissonance (vision – sound), twinkling vibrations (sound – touch)

The bodies filtered and processed through erincox and blackwd’s algorithm in Our bodies are the instruments (2022) generate twinkling vibrations that enable audiences to hear and feel their three-dimensionality. After pressing a glowing green button, subjects move into position while a camera digitally captures their silhouette. The screen, revealing their frozen pose, depicts the sonified data running like raindrops along the contours of their digital body. The score shifts from shimmering harmonies to a rippling dissonance as the digitised notes hit the contorted figures.

(1) This paper draws on research about synaesthesia and the senses from my PhD. See Megan R. Fizell, “Gastronomic Body: Sensory and sociocultural dimensions of food art,” (PhD dissertation, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2021).
(2) Hannah Jenkins, “Making and breaking bread with Eleanor Zurowski,” Firstdraft, accessed 11 June 2021, https://firstdraft.org.au/news/making-and-breaking-bread-with-eleanor-zurowski. 
(3) National Art School (@nas_au), “As part of The Postgrad Show 2021, MFA student Brydie Greedy (@greedy________) is presenting a multi-sensory experience throughout the duration of the exhibition,” Instagram, 24 January 2022, accessed 24 January 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CZF7616vnqN/. 
(4) Richard Cytowic, quoted in André J. Abath, “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Synaesthesia,” in Sensory Blending: On Synaesthesia and related phenomena, ed. Ophelia Deroy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 152.
(5) Abath, “Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Synaesthesia,” 152.
(6) “A(Di)pology,” Firstdraft, accessed 16 December 2022, https://firstdraft.org.au/s/2022-Roomsheets_LGFAC_Updated.pdf.

Project Proposal: This project begins by posing the question, what would sensory closed captioning look like, sound like, or feel like? By responding to the growing theoretical and curatorial interest in sensory art, this project aims to develop ways to convey the haptic, sonic, olfactory, and gustatory dimensions of art through experimental writing. I will explore the potential of synaesthetic perception to produce cross-modal correspondences (or intercommunication) between the senses as a means to facilitate a deeper understanding of an object. An example of this in practice is how a description of a meal can cause one’s mouth to salivate or how an image of food can invoke an impression of its taste.

The project will respond to upcoming Firstdraft exhibitions that feature sensory art to experiment with synaesthetic writing in art criticism. With many arts organisations now including written captions alongside Instagram posts and other visual media, I see this project sitting alongside the increasing drive to encourage accessibility across the arts sector. The project will test the potential of language to express intersensory exchanges while generating an approach to produce sensory closed captioning. 

Project Outcome:

Feeling images and sensing words (2023).

Case Study 1: Monica Rani Rudhar, I Cook A Lot Of All These Foods (2022)

Case Study 2: erincox and blackwd, Our bodies are the instruments (2022)

Exhibition: Aftertaste, 15 April to 12 August 2023
Location: Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Cabrogal/Fairfield
Public Programs: A Seat at the Table: Aftertaste Community Day
Date: 15 July 2023, 10-4pm
FCMG Programs Officer: San May

After Adelaide Hendle: Anzac biscuit mou(u)rning tea with Lindsay Kelley 

An artist talk and Anzac biscuit tasting with Lindsay Kelley (10:30 am – 11:30 am)

Takeaway Recreations with Siying Zhou

A lunchtime workshop led by Siying Zhou to transform selected Chinese takeaways purchased from local Fairfield restaurant, Lai Sun, into dishes that represent participants’ culture or history (12:00 – 2:00 pm)

The Origins of Sweet and Sour Pork with Jane Fan

Learn the history of Chinese sweet & sour pork through a cooking demonstration and tasting (1:00 pm – 3:00 pm)

Learning from hydrosols with Justine Youssef

Justine Youssef guided participants in distilling a scented oil from plants collected on the grounds of FCMG (2:00 pm – 2:40 pm)

Lebanese Coffee & Diaspora Stories with Reanne Chidiac

Reanne Chidiac invited guests to share their stories over Lebanese coffee and sweets (3:00 pm – 3:40 pm). The event began a live demonstration on how to prepare Lebanese coffee and included a reading of Chidiac’s story “Arabizi” published in the anthology “Between Two Worlds”.

CURATED EXHIBITIONS

• The Infinite Look: A History of Gazing Skyward, UNSW Main Library; 13 April – 30 October 2026.
• Revealing Riversleigh, UNSW Main Library; 29 September 2025 – 13 March 2026.
• Materials Revolution, UNSW Main Library; 31 March – 12 September 2025.
• Living Water: 75 years of water research at UNSW, UNSW Main Library, Law Library, Paddington Library; 8 July – 15 November 2024.
  ↳ Nominee, M&G NSW IMAGinE Award 2025 (Exhibition Project – Museums & Heritage – Small); (Engagement Program – Small).
• Sonus Maris, Jervis Bay Maritime Museum, Huskisson, NSW; 5 July – 13 Oct 2024.
• Hearts, Hands, Minds: 75 years UNSW Art Collection (co-curator), UNSW Main Library, Level 5; 25 March – 14 June 2024.
• Protests & Pranks, UNSW Main Library, Law Library, Paddington Library; *postponed, new date TBD.
• Care is a relationship, UNSW Main Library, Level 5; 4 September – 17 November 2023.
  ↳ Highly Commended, M&G NSW IMAGinE Award 2024 (Engagement Program – Galleries – Small).
  ↳ Nominee, M&G NSW IMAGinE Award 2024, Accessible Arts Award for Access and Inclusion and Exhibition Project – Galleries – Small.
• Love. Respect. Pride. (co-curator), UNSW Main Library, Level 3; 24 February – 26 May 2023.
• Sonus Maris, UNSW Main Library, Level 5; 6 February – 5 May 2023.
  ↳ Nominee, M&G NSW IMAGinE Award 2023 (Exhibition Project – Museums & Heritage – Medium).

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & DISPLAYS

• The Lunar Gaze, UNSW Paddington Library; June 2026 – June 2027.
• Welcome to the Frontier: From Science Fiction to Hyperstition, UNSW Law Library; 20 May 2026 – January 2027.
• Big to small and shapes between, UNSW Main Library Level 3; 25 November 2025 – June 2026.
• Drawn to Extinction, UNSW Law Library; 7 August 2025 – 18 May 2026.
• Technological Revolution: The Age of Acceleration, UNSW Paddington Library; 7 May – 20 October 2025.
• Industrial Revolution: Foundations of Modern Manufacturing, UNSW Main Library; 15 April – 4 August 2025.
• Colour: Inflexions and Interactions, UNSW Main Library & UNSW Paddington Library; 16 December 2024 – 9 March 2025.
  ↳ Nominee, M&G NSW IMAGinE Award 2025 (Exhibition Project – Museums & Heritage – Small); (Engagement Program – Small).
• Deep Illustrations, UNSW Main Library; 18 July – 11 December 2024.
• Liberating History: 50 Years of Tharunka’s “Women’s Issue”, UNSW Paddington Library; 6 March – 3 July 2024.
• Strange Tastes, UNSW Main Library; 21 November 2023 – 18 March 2024.
• Flesh & Bone: Illustrations of Anatomy, UNSW Main Library; 22 May – 18 August 2023.
• Ex Libris: 20th Century Australian Bookplates, UNSW Main Library; 5 December 2022 – 30 January 2023.

CATALOGUES & EXHIBITION TEXTS

• Exhibition guide, The Infinite Look (2026), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition guide, Big to Small and Shapes Between (2025-26), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition guide, Materials Revolution (2025), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition labels, Strange Tastes (2023), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition labels, Flesh & Bone: Illustrations of anatomy (2023), UNSW Library.
• “Foreword,” in More-than-Human Wellbeing (exhibition reader) (2023).
• Exhibition labels, Love. Respect. Pride. (2023), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition labels, Sonus Maris (2023), UNSW Library.
• Exhibition labels, Ex Libris: 20th Century Australian Bookplates (2022), UNSW Library.

PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS & RECORDED MEDIA

• (forthcoming) Co-presenter, “The Hybrid Museum: Libraries as Collaborative Knowledge Makers,” 19th International Conference on the Inclusive Museum, Chau Chak Wing Museum; September 2026.
• Panellist, “Curating collections, stories and impact: Exhibitions in Australian academic libraries,” ALIA National 2026, Sydney; 14 May 2026.
• Co-presenter, “Exhibiting Knowledge: An Experiential Approach to Research Engagement,” ALIA National 2026, Sydney; 13 May 2026.
• Presenter, “From Lab to Gallery: Translating STEM Research into Recyclable Exhibition Assets,” GLAMSLAM 2026, Australian Museum, Sydney, NSW; 23 April 2026.
• Co-presenter, “Library as Laboratory: Collaborating Across Campus to Transform STEM Research into Exhibitions,” STEMLibANZ Learning and Teaching Virtual Workshop, Online; 3 December 2025.
• Co-presenter, “Seeing, Touching, Thinking: UNSW Library Experiential Learning Program,” UNSW Education Festival 2025, UNSW Sydney; 27 November 2025. 
• Presenter, “Sustainable Exhibition Design: Educating Through Eco-Friendly Practices,” THETA 2025 Conference Winds of Change, Perth, WA; 26 May 2025.
  ↳ Audience Favourite Presentation Award; Richard D’Avigdor Conference Award 2024.
• Audio Guide Recording for the exhibition Materials Revolution, UNSW Library, 9min: 51sec; May 2025.
• Co-presenter, “From Science to Art: Interdisciplinary Exhibitions at UNSW Library,” Arlis/ANZ 2024 Conference BEING SEEN, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney; 28 November 2024.
• Audio Guide Recording for the exhibition Living Water: 75 years of water research at UNSW, UNSW Library, 17min: 56sec; August 2024.
• Opening speech for the exhibition Love. Respect. Pride., UNSW Library, Sydney;  2 March 2023.

PUBLIC ART COMMISSIONS

• Make or Break, Cover Crush, UNSW Main Library, Level 6; December 2023.
• Abdullah M.I. Syed, Chahār Bāgh: Garden of Knowledge, UNSW Main Library Level 7; September 2023.

MEDIA & CITATIONS

Crosby, Alexandra. “Ecological art can bring us closer to understanding nature. How does this look in the era of climate change?” The Conversation, 22 August 2024. Web. 
Dadich, A., Watfern, C., Doran, B., & Boydell, K. “Thinking and Caring with Arts-Based Research: An Assemblage of Methods to Promote Public Health.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 24 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069251381707.
Lawrence, Naomi. “The Infinite Look: Rewriting The Night Sky Across Time And Place.” CityHub, 18 April 2026. Web.
“Living Water exhibition unveiled.” UNSW News, 1 August 2024. Web. 
Lupton, Deborah. “Embodying social science research – The exhibition as a form of multi-sensory research communication.” London School of Economics, 12 July 2023. Web.
Lupton, Deborah, et al. “More-than-Human Wellbeing: Materialising the Relations, Affects, and Agencies of Health, Kinship, and Care.” M/C Journal 26:4 (2023): wellbeing.
Lupton, Deborah, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor, and Ash Watson. “Arts-Based and Sensory Methods to Imagine More-than-Human Automated Futures.” In The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures: Imaginaries, Interactions and Impact, 395-412. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2024.
“Materials Revolution Exhibition: Transforming Community Perceptions of Waste.” Sustainable Communities and Waste, 26 May 2025. Web. 
“UNSW hosts Timor-Leste President for discussions on water, food and health.” UNSW News, 18 October 2024. Web.
Watfern, Chloe, Priya Vaughan, and Katherine Boydell. “Care in the climate crisis: A collage.” Journal of Applied Arts & Health, 21 November 2025. Web.

About UNSW Library Exhibitions Program

As a point of intersection for students, researchers, and the broader community, UNSW Library is committed to enhancing the learning environment through an interdisciplinary exhibitions program. Over the academic year, UNSW Library stages one major exhibition per term in collaboration with partners across the University. Exhibitions allow academics to share and communicate their work as non-traditional research outputs. It is also an opportunity for students to encounter leading research and ideas outside their nominated disciplines. Through exhibitions, UNSW Library creates a space for discourse and discovery and supports scholarship not previously available within our collections.

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This talk surveys curatorial projects staging multisensory encounters where audiences see, hear, feel, smell, and sometimes taste the artworks on show. It will also touch on logistical challenges connected to exhibiting ephemeral, intangible, and edible materials. Key projects include Sugar, Sugar (2013), an exhibition featuring ten female artists using sugar as the primary material in immersive and interactive artworks, and reminiSCENT (2018), an exhibition of olfactory artworks exploring the relationship between scent and memory. These projects consider how food-based art invites subjects to contribute their own memories, associations, and appetites to their embodied experience of the sensorial pleasures or displeasures aroused by the artwork.

The images above are of my attempt in cultivating wild yeast to make my own sourdough bread. The results are mixed. The starter looked promising however my loaves turned out small, flat, dense and covered in parchment paper. It tastes good when toasted and I have high hopes for my next batch. I documented the entire process in my Instagram stores here. While this terrifying pandemic is circling the globe, I am trying to write my PhD thesis on food art. When I was in the final stages of my MA dissertation in 2007, I turned to baking bread as a way of coping with the stress. Since I am in my final year of my PhD candidacy, it was only a matter of time before I pulled out the container of flour and started kneading away.

Over the past five years researching food art, I noticed that again and again, artists used bread as a material for such artwork. As I found more examples of artists making sculptures, installations, and edible banquets with bread, I began collecting the research thinking one day post-PhD I will write an essay or do something with it. But as I said earlier, I’ve been thinking about bread a lot lately and so I figured now is as good a time as any to draw some of this research together. 

Left: Tim Silver, Oneirophrenia. 2015, plaster and baked bread. Detail of exhibition installation at Artspace, Sydney.
Right: Antoni Miralda, Coloured bread, 2019. Detail of exhibition installation, Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney.

My first thought was that artists used bread because, like ceramics, bread is baked in an oven and undergoes a material transformation. Baking is a powerful form of alchemy that can take three basic ingredients—water, flour, and yeast—and transform them into the ubiquitous foodstuff we all know and consume. When exposed to heat, bread dough swells, hardens, and mutates from the soft and malleable into a solid structure. This material transformation is highlighted in the 2015 series Oneirophrenia by Australian artist Tim Silver who filled plaster busts with dough that fractured and split when baked in an oven. The 2016 installation of these self-portrait busts at Artspace, Sydney left the gallery smelling like a bakery. I remember being drawn into the exhibition space by the aroma of toasted bread. I had a similar experience at the recent Kaldor exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Spanish artist Antoni Miralda’s installation saw tables piled high with loaves and baguettes of hyper-coloured bread. Although I found the red, yellow, green, and blue bread unappetising, I noticed that some intrepid visitors had sampled slices of the artwork. Although audiences were not invited to eat this artwork, perhaps the yeasty scent of the bread proved too tempting for some. 

Jennifer Rubell, Reconciliation (2009), Performed at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., USA. Photograph by Chi Lam.

In contrast, American artist Jennifer Rubell’s 2009 banquet Reconciliation saw guests at the National Portrait Gallery seated at a long table laden with long baguettes. The intention was for guests to ‘break bread’, eat and share the foodstuff with one another. This phrase, ‘breaking bread’, is a figure of speech used to express sharing a meal and also a symbolic reference to the Christian Eucharist. Silvia Malaguzzi notes in Food and Feasting in Art, bread “enjoyed a certain sacred aura thanks to Christian tradition, in which it symbolized the body of Christ in the ritual of the Eucharist, a divine food offered to the faithful”. The rich symbolic history of bread as representative of not only the Christian faith but of hospitality and charity could be another impetus for artists to utilise the material in their artwork.

As Rubell describes on her artist website,

“Our first view is the bread, and we quickly understand that unless together we decide to break it, we will not eat. We will use that bread as a utensil, as a vehicle, as a means of connection to those around us. Breaking bread will be our first shared action. The bread will not reconcile our differences, but it will bring us into conversation. We will learn to give and to take.”

– Jennifer Rubell

Rubell’s meal offers guests the opportunity to not only taste the artwork but to forge new connections through the symbolic act of ‘breaking bread’. 

These are but a few examples of food artists using bread in their artwork. Other notable artworks include Antony Gormley’s Bed (1980-81), Daniel Spoerri’s Catalogue Tabu (1961), Yonamine, Pão nosso de cada Dia (Our Daily Bread) (2016), Fiona Hall’s Crust (2014-15), David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Bread Sculpture) (1988-89), and Mario Merz’s Bread Igloo (1989) among others.