ARTIST STATEMENT
Considering eating as a symbiotic and symbolic experience, Céline imagines the narrations of collective experiences to accompany the Eater in the perception of his/her surroundings. Conducting field work in different contexts, she experiments contact zones between tastes and landscapes, and explores how the bodies, their gestures and related rituals can be the tools to a journey through the complexity of the places we live in, for a sensorial understanding.
BIO: Céline Pelcé is a French food artist and designer, currently working in a nomadic and contextual dynamic, mostly between North America and Western Europe. Her background is in both food and interior design that she studied in France. Since then, she’s been exploring food as a material carrying sensory poetics and narrations in different territories, to create culinary performances, unfolding dramaturgies and questions. Mixing work in the context of events, educational, and artistic practice, Céline Pelcé mainly works in collaboration with designers, artisans, chefs, and artists, in order to cross mediums for a common narrative. She has notably worked with the design unit of Lab-Ah in a psychiatric hospital unit (FR), and collaborated with the foodlab of the Jan Van Eyck Academy (NL). She shares her work in different cultural context, institutional places (Gent Design Museum, Collection Lambert in Avignon) as in local community-run projects. In parallel, her expertise also takes place in social, educational and hospital contexts. Eventually, an important part of Céline Pelcé’s practice is to explore Human cultural and spiritual relation to food and related rituals, especially by doing residencies, to conduct field works with locals, specially in North America, Western Europe and Japan.
Fish wrapped in Lotus leaf from 'Everything Starts from Within' - Dinner Experience in collaboration with The Performance Agency for the Kemmler & Kemmler Launch in Berlin, May 2022. (Photo owned by The Performance Agency). ’Everything Starts From Within’ was inspired by visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in which she elevates the container into the founding object of human civilization—the recipient, the holder, the story. The dinner concept was developed by culinary artists Celine Pelcé and Marente van der Valk, whose staged menu drew from the properties of the container; a meal to be offered, unwrapped, and shared.