Sammi Gay

Artist Statement

I am deeply moved by food and cities! My work orbits around these two heartbeats. For years, my artistic focus was primarily culinary - cooking and plating, of course, alongside the art of feeding people, paired with time capsules of food preservation. I make fermented beverages, vinegars, condiments, and spice blends; all using hyper-regional and foraged goods with the goal of capturing the flavors of a changing earth. For a long time, my other art mediums surrounded food - endless kitchen diaries, poems, and photographs aiming to capture the dance of the table and the lingering residue of meals. They still do but in the last few years my practice has expanded immensely including dioramic sculptures and printmaking.

Jazz hands, making focaccia in my kitchen with a friend. Photo credit Cherry Ayala.

Bio

Sammi Gay is a “kitchen-poet” (a la Edwidge Danticat) from the Bronx. Trained as an urban planner and farmer, Gay incorporates writing, cooking, and sculpture to probe at questions grounded in practices of preservation and collective memory. For Gay, fermentation — the chemical breakdown of organic matter by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms — is not only a cooking strategy; the method is also a regenerative embodied practice. Ferments, which call for an association of microbiomes to survive, model necessary social processes for building sustainable communities. Gay observes the tenets of fermentation in their work through theory and praxis: the social practice artist centers themes of community preservation in their writing, sculpture, and culinary creations.