An Inquest Concerning Teeth: Scouse and Still-Life Drawing
“What one eats, and in what setting, and with whom, creates statements about the hosts and the diners.”
Last month we transformed our social space into a dining room for the Scouse and Still-Life drawing workshop in the ‘An Inquest Concerning Teeth’ series. This series is supported by the Independents Biennial and is produced by the TRS Directors.
The series is centred around food and as the series was to coincide with the Biennial, we wanted to create workshops around local delicacies using ingredients bought from local and independently owned businesses that generate strong feelings and dialogue.
For international audiences visiting the city this summer and our local community of artists and audience, we chose to cook beef and blind Scouse. Scouse is a clipped version of Lobscouse which is said to originate from Scandinavia. Scouse in Liverpool is a variation of that stew. Scouse is a noun and an adjective. A Scouser is a person from Liverpool. Scouse is a local dialect. Scouse is an amalgamation of cultures created in our ports by migration, industrialisation, and our role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Our guest facilitator for this workshop was Mic, a Liverpool-based artist with a background in English Literature, exploring beauty in mundanity through warm-toned still-life oil paintings. Whilst mostly self-taught, she has explored Liverpool’s art scene through attending local life drawing classes, and an oil painting course at Kirkby Gallery in January to February of 2024 led by Harry Garner. She has exhibited in grassroots group shows ‘Existing Loudly’ and ‘Unnamed Project Exhibition’, and currently has her piece ‘Favourite Things’ exhibited in The Liverpool Art Fair. Her painting practice navigates the transition from girlhood to womanhood using traditional oil painting techniques. Embodying the intimate narratives of daily life ‘freeze-frames’, her work promotes stillness and reflection, gratitude for the now. For Mic, painting is a spiritual practice akin to meditation. Since moving to Liverpool for university in 2019, she has rooted herself in the city’s rich creative history and (more recently) its current thriving scenes. Mic’s creative endeavours are motivated by the desire to connect with local artists and to showcase pieces that encourage recentring joy as a daily practice, not a reward to be earnt.
The workshop began with drawing exercises designed to ease participants into the session. After this, Heavy Digestations served Scouse with home brewed brown sauce and home pickled beetroot and red cabbage. Mic guided participants through eating and drawing the Scouse in various stages of consumption.
Why Scouse and Still-Life? To combine the still-life with Scouse is to reconceptualise early still-life painting. Rather than drawing randomly assorted ingredients, we focus on a meal. In place of abundance and luxuriousness, we offer a dish popular with working-class people. We embrace disorder in half-finished bowls and beetroot stains to show signs of life. We make a muse of the lowly carrot, cabbage, and onion, ingredients that rarely left kitchen or market paintings for the stylised table of that hold status. To document the meal in the process of eating, we create tension between our sometimes careless consumption and meditation. To document personal habits and private rituals but also, communal meals, shared histories, migration, a maritime connection, economics, trends, reality. We do not concern ourselves with old ideas of art depicting food being low value or commonplace.
In Mic’s words:
“Cooking and eating food are two actions we take for granted. Actions that seem like a given in our day-to-day but are closer to luxuries than we realise. Having the time and energy to cook is a privilege. Buying groceries is a privilege. Eating home-cooked meals is a privilege. Our society is so fast paced we are unable to take the time to recognise this. It’s designed for us to consume and go, Huel now a common supplement. To eat the most convenient thing for the sole purpose of re-energisation so we can resume our work and be the most productive human robot that ever existed. We are pushed to decentre the very act of survival so we can prioritise workload, and self-improvement rooted in hyper-individualism. We streamline daily actions to maximise our time to pursue the myth of work-life balance. We burn ourselves out for the perfect body (a trend designed to make us insecure enough to buy into products and services). For the perfect Instagram feed. Always planning ahead or reminiscent of the past. Rarely do we relish in presence, ogle at the beauty right in front of us, without the need to capture the moment with a photo and snappy line for our stories.
Social media plays a big part in the way we live. Not only does it meddle with and warp our self-perception, but its dictation of the way we ‘should’ live is becoming more and more prolific. We eat at trendy places gone viral, and drink coffee at establishments discovered online. We post and repost. We curate our feeds and manage our social life as if we are merely avatars to another world. ‘Slice of life’ content and ‘what I eat in a day’ is a perfectly manicured version of reality. Photodumps are our attempt to be deemed relatable, we cosplay real in a carousel of 10-20 images and a caption that doesn’t make grammatical sense.
When was the last time you ignored the aesthetic quality of your meal in place of recognising the miles each component has travelled to be digested? When did you last think of the farmers that had 3am starts so the vegetables on your plate could thrive on the field? When was the last time you thought of the low-paid workers who harvest these vegetables? When did you last think of the butchers who turned livestock into steak cuts? The animals that gave their lives so we could enjoy a takeaway. The lorry drivers delivering our ingredients to the shops we like to peruse? The tesco workers, cooks in restaurants and factories, the waiters you look down on.”
You can keep up with Mic and her work on Instagram @mics_art_fix
