Kitchen Studio, Elizabeth Willing

Speculative Architecture collaborated with artist Elizabeth Willing on her performative-exhibition Kitchen Studio, held at Metro Arts gallery as part of the 2024 Brisbane Festival. The collaboration focused upon the spatial planning and material form of the exhibition spaces, lighting, and the design & fabrication of nine dining chairs.

The exhibition explores ideas and politics around industrial food production, with Elizabeth’s practice considering the experiences, and the aesthetics, of the gut and digestion. 

Through the spatial design of the exhibition, we endeavored to create an experience that may be at once familiar and uncanny. Familiarity is created with reference to small-scale boutique restaurants: minimal signage, discrete entry, nuanced lighting and a small number of patrons. An uncanny feeling is explored through an intestinal-like plan of the room that takes visitors on a journey through a tunnel-like space before arriving and being deposited in a gut-shaped room. Curtains with visceral coloured patterns and backdrop enclose the spaces, with a dim light feature providing a close and quiet experience. A simple kitchen is positioned in the shopfront window of the gallery, revealed to passers-by but hidden from the participants within.