Operating at the critical intersection of ecological precarity and systemic critique, Edible States offers an urgent investigation into our modern food systems. The exhibition constructs interactive, living and tactile environments that map the direct friction between natural ecosystems and hyper-processed synthetic realities. Through site-specific and material interventions, Andrew Rewald, Keg De Souza and Elizabeth Willing subvert the sensory mechanics of taste, thereby reframing the act of eating. It transforms food consumption into a potent exploration of systemic entanglement, material reality and ecological survival.
Supported by Create NSW and Creative Australia
About the artists
Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives on the lands of the Gadigal people. Architecturally trained, she creates social and spatial environments, making reference to her lived experiences of squatting and organising with projects that use plant and food politics, temporary architecture, publishing and radical pedagogy. De Souza draws from personal experiences of colonialism, such as the deep colonial loss over 450 years of her own ancestral peoples to living as a settler on unceded lands, informing her layered projects that centre voices that are often marginalised, for learning about Place. Themes of displacement – through lenses such as colonialism and gentrification – travel through her work, sharing (often lesser-known) stories of plants, people and Place. Keg has made projects nationally and internationally for: South London Gallery; Artspace, Sydney; Setouchi Triennale; Biennale of Sydney; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Delfina Foundation, London; Jakarta Biennale (with ruangrupa) and Auckland Triennial.
Keg was the 2022 Parramatta Artist Studios Creative Fellow; the 2024 Dahl Fellow, Eucalypt Australia and the 2024 Gilbert Fellow, Sydney University. Keg is a member of various collaborative groups including SquatSpace (who ran the Redfern/Waterloo: Tour of Beauty) and the Food Art Research (FAR) Network and has degrees in Architecture, Fine Arts and a PhD, Monash University. Keg is a trained bookbinder and has a certificate in Botanical Illustration from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Keg is represented by Booklyn Artist Alliance, NY for her artist’s books and zines which she has been publishing for over 20 years.
The subject of Andrew Rewald’s ecological transdisciplinary art practice is plants. His ancestral Germanic and colonial settler farmer backgrounds, chef experience and ongoing investigation of land restoration in the Northern Rivers region of NSW inform a de-colonising approach to sharing knowledge/s of food-culture, biodiversity and the interconnectedness of all things. This is underpinned by social engagement and collaboration with rural and urban community groups and First Nations knowledge holders for workshops, garden installation, food-based performance and botanical drawings.
Since 2012 Rewald has undertaken local and international residency, exhibition and research projects on the migration of food and medicine plants with people, linking our diverse agriculture histories with biodiversity and constant climate adaptation. Rewald is currently supported by Creative Australia while mentored by Cudgenburra/Bundjalung Aboriginal man Clarence Slockee – presenter on ABC’s Gardening Australia and founder of Indigenous company Jiwah Cultural Landscape and Design – with research at Royal Botanical Gardens Daniel Solander Library and the National Herbarium at Mount Annan, Sydney.
Elizabeth Willing is a Brisbane based visual artist whose works are performative and often participatory explorations of food and hosting. Primarily working in sculpture, installation, and performance, Elizabeth’s work additionally takes the form of hosted meals.
Elizabeth has undertaken professional development mentorships in New York with Janine Antoni (2011), with the Experimental Food Society in London (2012) and then with Thomas Rentmeister in Berlin (2014). In 2019 she completed a Masters of Fine Art at Queensland University of Technology.
Residencies are an important component of Elizabeth’s creative process. She has been resident at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2014), Helsinki International Art Program HIAP (2015), New England Regional Art Museum Armidale (2018), The Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide (2019), Urban Art Projects and MAVA (2022), Latrobe Art Institute and Wangaratta Art Gallery (2024).
Exhibitions of Elizabeth’s work have been held in Australia and overseas at Trapholt Museum of Art and Design Denmark, Tinguely Museum Basel, The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane, Musee Beaux Arts Angers France, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. For two months in 2024 Elizabeth opened Kitchen Studio, a restaurant designed for conceptual dining.
Elizabeth is represented by Tolarno Galleries Melbourne.
Full curatorial text
Edible States maps out a narrative trajectory of contemporary human relationship with food. The exhibition pivots the conversation away from identity anchors towards the mechanics of broader food systems. It traces a path from soil to synapse, its transformation, ultimate consumption and decay across a macroscopic to microscopic axis. By grounding these conceptual frameworks in specific material interventions, the exhibition illustrates how agricultural, structural and physiologicial processes of food shape our everyday reality.
The curatorial arc opens at the foundational tier of botany and harvesting. Informed by his training as a professional chef and anthropologist, Andrew Rewald utilises plant matter as both medium and subject to reconstruct our fractured relationship with both environment and food. His Ethnobotanicals series traces the connections between plants, people, society and culture through migration of plants and people. Rewald weave narratives of foraging, seed-carrying and Aboriginal land cultivation against the destructive history of modern agriculture and deforestation. Case of Emergency extends this, through the collection of seeds in an installation that speaks to seedbanks for doomsday scenarios. Harvested by the artist from Northern Rivers NSW, the edible and medicinal specimens highlight their use and relates to the Ethnobotanicals prints. By elevating wild edible plants and local flora, his practice reframes the farm not as a passive faculty of monoculture but a living ecosystem where botanical survival and human migration collide.
The exhibition expands into discussions of how resource distribution structure human geography. Keg De Souza’s Not A Drop To Drink Cartographies subverts traditional Cartesian mapping by prioritising lived narratives over physical terrain. These works document five live, performative communal meals. During these collaborative events, participants gathered around a glass table to map community strategies for climate crisis, food preservation, and water scarcity De Souza preserves the ephemeral nature of these gatherings by printing conversational transcripts directly onto glass sheets, reflecting the materiality of the meal - sandwiching dried, drought-tolerant flora between the panels. Rooted in De Souza’s broader practice of spatial politics and temporary architecture, the series documents community dialogues surrounding climate precarity and water scarcity. This mapping exposes how institutional power lines dictate migrant foodways, tracing the ways displaced populations must navigate legal, architectural, and environmental hostility to preserve ancestral culinary knowledge. Drought Dialogues returns to plant life, with a botanical and sound installation featuring living, edible drought-tolerant plant, the Blue Flax-Lily (Dianella caerulea) native to Dharug land. The soundscape captures the plant’s electric signals in real time, providing an opportunity to interact with plants sonically.
Finally, the focus contracts to the internal, physiological threshold where external systems met human biology. Elizabeth Willing confronts the visceral realities of industrial manufacturing and bodily digestion. Her Wine Press Membrane series Seppeltsfield (2021, 2025) repurposed heavy polyurethane textile byproducts from commercial winemaking to expose the hidden, industrialised scale of luxury fermentation. This forms a dialogue with Pluck, a cold-finished porcelain sculptures cast from vacuum-packed, commercial franktfurt sausages. Stripped of their artificial red casings, the bundled forms are meticulously engraved with patterns mimicking the velvet villi of the human gut. The new, site-specific installation Skin Contact speaks to the process of steeping crushed grapes to extract flavours and colour from the grape skin into wine. The process of peeling grapes and the materiality of the work references the modern day obsession with cleaning and ridding our foods of chemicals added during processing and production. Willing underscores the compromised position of the modern consumer, who is forced to digest not only physical nutrients, but the synthetic realities and hyper-processed chemicals od modern food consumption.
Together, these artists challenge viewers to look far beyond the plate. Edible States reframes nutrition as an intensively politicised, ecological and biological web. By linking the microscale of the human gut microbiome to the macroscale of global corporate supply chains, the exhibition reveals how the everyday act of eating binds us to invisible networks of power, extraction and inevitable decay.
Rachael Kiang
Curator