When Laurie Ramsell asked us if we’d like to be involved in BAB LAB, his festival of artists working with biological materials, we immediately said yes. And so this Monday saw Loaf hosted a Yeast themed day of workshops and talks.
Laurie’s aim for the week is to encourage artists to consider working with biological materials and living things, and most of the participants were practicing artists, bringing a focussed but still playful inquisitiveness to the subject.
Martha introduces the yeast
We ran a short version of our bread course in the morning, giving a solid grounding in what yeast is and the ways we work with it to make bread, before letting them loose with some dough.
Over lunch we had a talk from Rosa Postlethwaite, a performance artist who has been using a sourdough starter in her work, focussing on it as a living creature and thinking about what it means to collaborate with it.
And then in the afternoon we had Günter Seyfried in our kitchen making “yeastograms” where shadows of UV light create images in yeast cultures. We went through the full process of making the agar to inoculate in Petri dishes and the next day had our living artworks. Here’s the Loaf logo:
Some photos from the day are on the BAB Lab Instagram. The festival continues at venues across Birmingham this week and we really hope it returns next year as it’s given us lots of ideas!
