Feast, Famine is a Manitoba Craft Council exhibition that explores how climate change relates to food: how it’s served, prepared, grown, and distributed. Exhibiting artists investigate the crisis of food production alongside possible solutions, crafted with a thoughtful connection between materials and maker. The works are displayed on a large table in the gallery, an intimate setting that brings to mind packed holiday dinners with extra seats squeezed in, shoulder to shoulder – a dinner party with eleven artists invited to contribute.

Participating Artists: Anja Studer, Anna Schmidt, Cloyd Barth, Candace Lipischak, Debra Frances Plett, Eric Au, Jessica Hodgson, Julianna Zwierciadlowska-Rhymer, Lesley Nakonechny, Melanie Matheson, and Sandra Vincent.

Jurors: Erin Weinberg, Terry Hildebrand, and Val Vint.

they danced in the slough examines notions of what feasting looks like on the Canadian prairies. A golden field glistens across the horizon; weed free and atop a smooth layer of black topsoil, a sense of prosperity and abundance is offered.

Advances in soil science however, are showing that this scene is not as picture perfect as often imagined. This piece brings us below the surface of a larger story, where we see the impacts of processes such as over-tilling, over reliance of chemical sprays and poor crop residue management negatively reflected in the soil.

At the edge of the field, a trio cultivate a small piece of neglected land in a different way. They let go of control and dance in celebration of nature, secure in the wisdom that we are nature, not separate. The soil below them reflects this. 

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