Here’s to Thee!
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This project draws partnership between academics and arts practitioners to facilitate creative and effective means of knowledge and interaction with local food and products.
In 2020, Professor Harry G West teamed up with artist Simon Pope on a project commissioned by Arts and Culture University of Exeter and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. The project assembled a community of people with shared interests in the heritage of Devon cider making and Devon folkways around Grays Farm in Halstow.
Central to the work has been an exploration of the more-than-human dimensions of cider making through the production of a wassail ritual that celebrates the microbial ecology of the orchard and pound house—an ecology essential to the making of the Grays family's cider.
Singer/songwriter Jim Causley collaborated with Pope on a new wassail song, and together with Bill Murray, and the shanty crew Mariners Away, has led in its performance annually on the farm to wake the apple trees and bring fruit in the new season. Ceramic artist Abigail North has produced clay drinking vessels for these occasions from clay on the farm—one of which has been exhibited at the RAMM alongside other historical objects associated with the production and consumption of cider in Southwest England. The wassail has been documented by the photographer Robert Darch and by the filmmaker Bevis Bowden. Other events have included a meal celebrating the Grays Farm ecology, produced by Kaye Winwood, and a colloquium on Devon cider at the RAMM, co-organised by the university research network, Exeter Food.
West and Pope plan further research with their collaborators to examine how the micro and macro-cultures of cider making transgress boundaries, as well as the implications of such flows for those who champion the terroir of regional foods and seek to protect them through geographical indication regimes.
The work has exemplified how partnership between academics and arts practitioners facilitates more creative and effective means of knowledge production and exchange.
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