We’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to design installations for Culinaria Autumn and had a great (albeit long) day setting up today. It looks like it’s going to be an amazing event!
Each person in the class had to come up with and present ideas for installations for Culinaria. After presenting, revising and presenting again, four of the ideas were chosen and we worked on the four in groups. My idea, to make an installation using emojis, was chosen and Juliette and Lyse joined me to develop and realise it. We ended up with a series of text conversations that had jokes about food.
The below video shows me painting our lemon macarons to test how well the paint would take. We were originally thinking of using icing, but it was proving to be difficult to get a clean result with and we didn’t need our emojis to be edible, as they’re purely decorative.
Below is a couple of photos of the beautiful printer’s where we got our speech bubble artwork printed and laser cut. It was a cool place and they were playing amazing rap music. It was a pleasant change from the likes of Reads where I used to go during college in Dublin. It was a stressful place! Visiting this place made me want to get loads of things printed and laser cut just for the sake of it.
Here’s our team this morning measuring up before assembling our text conversations.
Below you can see a chef’s stand (of which there are many) where we would be installing our text conversations. Below right is the lunch we were supplied with. How often do I get a free lunch? Never! This was delish. My dad always says that food tastes best when it’s made by someone else which, normally, I strongly disagree with. Today, however, after hours spent spray-painting tonnes of monstera leaves, I was very very grateful for a sandwich made by someone else! Perhaps my dad has a point!
Below is Eva, Louise and Nicholas working on their beautifully striking installation!
We tested hot glue to see if it would stick our macaron emojis to our printed speech bubbles. It worked well. Thankfully Lyse had a lot of experience with it and was able to do a much much neater job than I’d have managed with hot glue.
So here is how they turned out! We went with an autocorrect idea for one of the conversations. It’s based on an actual conversation I found on the internet. It wasn’t easy to find jokes in English that A) were relevant to Culinaria and B) would be understood by non-native English speakers. There was a lot of trial and error. It’s so hard to imagine how other people will perceive your joke. Sometimes we’d think we had cracked it and then we’d show the others and they wouldn’t get it.
And here’s an example of a little recipe riddle that only French speakers will get… And no—I’m not telling you the answer! Il faut essayer…
These are the leaves that we were spray-painting white… There were a lot of them! Notice how glamorous it is(n’t) behind the scenes!
That’s it! I need to get to sleep now, it’s been a loooong day!
