Permission Cookbook is a self-published artbook/research project produced in conjunction with my MFA final exhibition at Memorial University. I’m printing a limited run of 50 copies, after which additional copies will be sold on a print-on-demand basis.
If you would like to pre-order a copy of Permission Cookbook, please fill out the form below. Copies are $45 with a limited number of free/PWYC copies available. Shipping Sep 2023
I believe in the power of food: I believe in its ability to not just sustain or heal us physically, but to be an instrument of connection and liberation. Permission Cookbook is the culmination of over three years of writing, research, and artmaking into how food is understood as a cultural and social tool, undertaken during my MFA at Memorial University of Newfoundland. These pages contain the foundational concepts of my art practice which is a loving dive into research on fat acceptance, Black liberation, disability justice and body politics at large. My artwork is an exploration of what the brilliant minds behind these social movements can teach us about how we think of our bodies - how we love them, how we seek to control them, and how we can use them as conduits to connect with our personal histories and lineages. Divided into three categories under the umbrella of what I call “impermissible foods” (Fats, Sugars, and Ferments), are essays, artworks, and recipes that beckon questions of why we restrict and ask how we can call ourselves, and each other towards not just acceptance, but radical permission.
The collection of essays housed here speaks to the forms, materials, and concepts within my art practice in ways that are both direct and experimental. These are research papers and personal storytelling on the acceptability politics of the body and how these politics impact how and what we eat. They nod towards my formal and conceptual decisions of how I use the scale of my own body on micro and macro levels, and my use of the forms and colours of medical imagery. This body of work is an act of personal storytelling rooted in the academic and cultural lineage of my artistic peers and educators, and the activists, researchers, writers, content creators, and artists I have cherished from afar.
The recipes come from a lifetime of falling in and out of love with food; they are adapted from beloved family recipes, my father’s exacting lessons on cooking with skill and decadence, and my mother’s teachings on preparing the cheap, quick and nourishing meals of a single working mom. They come from the first dinners I cooked for myself and for friends as a young adult, from the practiced hands of the chefs I worked alongside in restaurants and cafes over the years, and from the many ups and downs and explorations of grappling with disordered eating. These dishes are offered as pinpoints on my personal map toward healing my relationship with food, and by extension, with my body. They are unapologetic and celebratory. They are meant to be shared in good company or enjoyed in private moments eating at our kitchen counters. I invite you to make and taste these foods with curiosity and adventure. Don’t be precious about these recipes - adapt them to your own tastes and ways of eating. Wherever this book takes you and wherever you take its contents is up to you - there is room for everything in these pages but shame.
Acknowledgements
I want to extend the biggest, messiest heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped me through my MFA and made this project possible. I do not have the words to describe the incredible gratitude that I feel for the support, encouragement, belief and excitement that people have shown me during my time at Memorial and in the creation of this book and its corresponding body of work.
First, thank you so much to my partner, Shawn, who tasted recipes, spent long nights talking through ideas with me, joined me in Newfoundland for our onsite intensive and looked after our twins while I worked many long nights and weekends – my life does not work without you. Thank you to my parents whose sharp eyes and minds are always pushing me to be the best artist, cook and version of myself that I can be. Thank you to my grandmother and her deep knowledge. Thank you to my fellow MFA cohorts who cheered me on, offered brilliant insight, fed me and collaborated with me (with special mention to Erienne Rennick and Kellyann Henderson for creating custom ceramic dishes for Permission Lunch, Syd Lancaster who helped me cook for 20 people and Sheilagh O’Leary who took the photos for my self-portraits). Thank you to the professors and staff at MUN who offered me incredible guidance, gave me a million great things to read, and allowed me many accommodations: especially my supervisors (Larry Weyand, Marc Lossier and D’Arcy Wilson), my advisor Anyse Ducharme, and David Dyck, Cameron Forbes, Ingrid Mary Percy, Andrew Testa, Matthew Hill and Robert Hengeveld. Thank you to Emily Anderson for her beautiful documentation of Permission Lunch that brings colour and polish to these pages, and Brady Tighe for his ruthless editing eye which was always delivered with kindness and humour.
I also want to acknowledge the creation of this work and the research upholding it, the foods that are cultivated, and the life that I live as an uninvited guest on the sovereign Indigenous lands of Turtle Island. Particularly Lenapehoking, the lands of the Lenape and Delaware people where I grew up and my family resides, Kjipuktuk, the unsurrendered land of the Mi’kmaq where I currently live and work and Elmastukwek and Mi’kma’ki, the lands of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit where Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus is located and the site of my final exhibition, the launch of this book and where much of the creation and research of this project took place. The human relationship to food and its cultivation, when experienced through Indigenous ways of knowing is healed and reciprocal – we have much to learn as settlers and guests on this land when it comes to the ways that we understand and give thanks to the gifts that these lands and waters offer. These gifts obligate us to support the actions of Indigenous people across Turtle Island and combat the historic and ongoing harm of colonialism from which we, as settlers, benefit.
This body of work was made possible by the financial support of Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.