People often ask if our posters are meant to be cooked from. Sometimes they are. Often they aren’t. Mostly, that’s not really the point. Let me take a few steps back.
At Food For Everyone, every artwork begins with a recipe, usually contributed by a chef or restaurant we admire. Over the years, that has included people like Dan Hunter of Brae, Josh Niland, Rick Stein, Maggie Beer, Annie Smithers and Julia Busuttil Nishimura, alongside many home cooks whose recipes carry just as much weight.
Once we hand the recipe over to an artist, the art takes over. Ingredients become shapes. Stories are told through colour, composition and brush strokes.
What we are interested in is not accuracy, but atmosphere. The feeling of a dish. Think Nigella’s dark, sumptuous chocolate cake, rather than a perfect photo-like art piece of the cake. My favourite example of this, is Nadia Hernandez's work with Attica.
Recipes evolve. They are passed on, misremembered, scribbled on the backs of envelopes, argued over by different generations. They are rarely followed to the letter and almost always adapted. In that sense, they are already halfway to being art.
When we turn a recipe into a poster, the goal is not preservation, it is interpretation. Artists like Ken Done, Alice Oehr, Phoebe Stone, Nadia Hernandez, Libby Haines, Allie Webb and Nourie Flayhan have all approached recipes in their own way. Some literal, some loose, some barely recognisable as instructions at all.
In my early work, (it is Gemma Leslie here) you really could cook from the posters. I would paint all the ingredients, then use InDesign to layer in the recipe and method. They were playful and practical. But even then, they were just as likely to spark a conversation as a dinner.
Over time, the work has settled more clearly into what it wants to be. Art prints. Recipe posters designed to be framed, lived with, and enjoyed on the wall.
And for me, that is what I love most. Where art, food and culture overlap, and everyone is invited.
