The Ideal Recipe: 2006/2007
Ellen Duckenfield, a woman obsessed with feeding people tells her personal story through her own recipe book, ending in a feast of food.
Her journey occupies a moral maze between her hippy family's political roots, her middle-class privilege and the contrast of growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s era of the individual - 'get rich quick' mentality - that drives her desire for personal success.
Part dinner party, part genealogical excavation, part cookery demonstration, The Ideal Recipe weighs up the intricate balance between responsibility to others and responsibility to oneself.
Performed at the BAC, Fresh Festival, Oval House and Duckie (extract).
"The ultimate achievement of The Ideal Recipe is successfully transforming food into much more than simple nostalgia trigger. Duckenfield manages to perform food as physical or body-to-body memory; cooked and consumed as a loaded and tangible gift moving from one person to another, thus creating a network and community of its own. At the end of the performance the artist ensures the audience is complicit in this particular food gift economy. Leaving the stage she invites everyone to dine out on her wares, to eat the fruits of her labour. However, faced with Duckenfield's 'gift' of food we are left, mid bite of Guacamole, wondering what, or who, is passing between us. What elements of Duckenfield's life, her family, have we consumed?"
reviewed by Rachel Lois Clapham for Live Art UK
