Harvest: Art, Film and Food

Harvest explores food as a subject for contemporary art: its production, consumption and symbolism, as well as our relationship to the land on which it is grown. It includes works ranging from northern European still-life paintings of the seventeenth century, which evoke international trade and the dawn of colonialism through their inclusion of food, flowers and spices from Africa, Asia and the Americas, to representations of relationships to land and produce closer to home. As a nation, Australia is often represented by imagery of settlers occupying land and struggling to work it to sustain their new life and their new identity. Contemporary representations by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists trace an ongoing connection between food, country and cultural knowledge. Contemporary artists continue to explore not only what the colonial period brought to Europe, but also what flows from the north to the south. This publication, in which essays, plates, interviews, recipes and film notes are intertwined, looks at the global food trade and the sampling of emblematic regional specialities from around the world. Topical related themes, including the relationship between food production and land, ethics, sustainability and ecology are explored.