From the Ground Up: Community, Cultivation and Commensality

From the Ground Up: Community, Cultivation and Commensality bring together six different approaches and perspectives to food cultivation and its consumption.

Including new works by BC Collective (Cora-Allan Wickliffe and Daniel Twiss), Xin Cheng and Adam Ben-Dror, Aroha Gossage, Hōhua Thompson, Zoe Thompson-Moore and ceramics from The Dowse Collection, From the Ground Up: Community, Cultivation and Commensality looks to the interdependent nature of food and people and specifically the conditions and ecologies of growing, making and sharing food.

As an essential part of our daily lives, food is embedded in human culture and reflects critical aspects of personal and collective histories, tales of migration, guardianship and exploitation of the land. The artists and artworks included in this exhibition investigate these personal, ecological and historical narratives of cultivation in Aotearoa, and commensality—the act of eating together—thinking through the politics of what it means to grow and eat together, of food as a conduit between people.