Huskisson’s Indian restaurant, Taj, is exhibiting a collaborative collection of artworks and written musings by Katie Coogan-Mason and Melissa Dunlop respectively. The exhibition opened last Saturday, with a set menu curated by Taj owners Arron Singh and Emily Stevenson to accompany the collection. Katie’s artworks and Melissa’s writing will remain in Taj for viewing until 14 December, with a few pieces still available for purchase. We spoke with Katie and Melissa about their art, the inspiration behind the exhibition, and what comes next.
Meet the Artists
Katie Coogan-Mason and Melissa Dunlop’s creativity is not restricted to paper; it really begins atop the dining table. When I first meet Katie and Melissa, their dining table is strewn with dimpled ceramic dishes overflowing with segments of charred capsicum, green olives, and oily artichoke hearts. Katie tends to a pot that is far larger than her torso, pulling thick ribbons of fresh pappardelle from the boiling water and tossing them in the garlicy butter sauce that Melissa stirs. Although they are not chefs by trade, I am fairly certain they could be.
“At what point do we really become artists?” Katie asks me one morning, as she shows me where she creates her art in Jervis Bay, or “the Bottega” as she likes to call it. “Not Bodega!” she clarifies, laughing, but “Bottega, the Italian word for a master’s studio”. While she may not feel like she is a master yet, the title is a form of manifestation. “Is [becoming an artist] when other artists or peers deem me an artist, or is it when I just declare, ‘This is my practice’ and that’s what I want to do with my life?” She questions. “And so I just declared it to myself.”
It’s the very thing she told Melissa when she asked her to write corresponding pieces for her artworks. Writing had always been a love of Melissa’s, but she was hesitant to exhibit her work. She wrote the accompanying musings to Katie’s artworks under the alias Anais Non, or A.non for short. It is a witty attempt at anonymity that pays homage to one of her favourite authors, Anaïs Nin, though the mask was ultimately dropped on the night of the exhibition.
Food as a Love Language
After a few years of mainly portraiture and digital art during lockdown, Katie tells me she felt as though she “needed a period of less introspection”. Her creativity resurfaced in an unexpected form. Her recent collection, Food as a Love Language, was born from a Christmas gift for her son, who requested a recipe book of all his favourite, nostalgic meals from his parents. “I thought it was a really beautiful request. I couldn’t just stop at writing [the recipes] down, and I decided to illustrate the book. When I started doing it, I found it to be really therapeutic because I wasn’t… delv[ing] deep into my feelings, it was purely a gift of love.”
Slowly, the project evolved into a collection of separate mixed media artworks. In what Katie describes as an artistic dodge of IP, she created her own labels for food packaging with “beautiful messaging and little secret symbolism”. On the walls of the Bottega hang small, wooden picture frames of Katie’s few remaining artworks from the collection that she kept. There’s an illustrated coffee-bean jar reminiscent of the brand ILLY, except it’s missing an ‘L’. Beneath the branding is the word “Valentina”, the name she bestowed upon her personal coffee machine. She hopes it reads as though she is declaring, “I love you, Valentina”.
The collection is a love letter to the moments food had facilitated connection in her life. When I ask her if there was a moment that kindled her love for mealtimes, she can’t pinpoint only one. She tells me of her childhood, when her father took her to a colleague’s house, and she had her hands bathed in fragrant rose water. Even after the unceasing courses, they were served silver platters groaning with exotic fruits, sweet dates, and segmented oranges. When she was fourteen, she visited Portugal to stay with her friend’s French-Portuguese family. Each night, they would eat rice with succulent, buttery meat, and her friend’s grandmother would make bread from a hope chest full of dough topped with fresh sardines from the ocean. Then there was the pauper’s meal from her mother’s childhood, which she wanted to share with Katie when they moved to England. “Pie, eels, and mash…It looked horrific because [the stewed eel] was in a big swamp of…green parsley sauce with malt vinegar, but it tasted great.”
These memories underpin the conceptual core of the collection. Eventually, though, she wanted to go broader. For her collections to be a “point of inclusivity”. This art wouldn’t just resonate with her story, but “connect with all people from any walk of life, at any table, at any time, no matter what they’re eating…the quality of the product, and the price on it. It’s about sitting with people you love.”
E•A•T – Emily, Arron, Taj
Katie’s latest collection, E•A•T, which was exhibited on 15 November, was spawned from this idea. It is a collaboration with Emily Stevenson and Arron Singh, the owners of Huskisson’s Indian restaurant Taj. The exhibition was a multi-sensory experience that combined a set menu based on Arron and Emily’s food memories with artworks Katie created from these stories and musings Melissa wrote to accompany the pieces.
Taj is Katie and Melissa’s favourite restaurant in Huskisson, and they often dine there together. On the exhibition’s opening night, they stood in the centre of the restaurant, welcoming everyone to their tables, which were decorated with various arrangements of cinnamon sticks, star anise pods, and red chillies.
The first artwork Katie shows from E•A•T is a packet of mustard seeds titled Spice of Life, from Nagaur, India. She’s labelled them “must have seeds”, a clever wordplay that references how they are the base of most dishes that Arron cooks. Culturally, the seeds are used to protect against evil spirits and are thrown into a fire to ward off hexes. “They make a popping sound in the heat, symbolic of warding off the malevolent spirits,” she explains, hence why she’s inscribed the packet with “pods to pops of protection”.
Katie then reads Melissa’s accompanying writing aloud. Melissa has personified a frying pan, inciting its “wildest rage” as it is heated against a flame and a “metal spoon scrape[s] her bottom/ Then smack[s] her dented rim.” One diner joked that he wishes to be the pan.
Within the next moment, Melissa’s writing is drawing a heartfelt “aww” from the crowd, as she compares Arron’s heart to the spice box his father brought with him when he came to Australia. The piece’s final line depicts Emily carrying the spice box to place back on its shelf, symbolising how the moment he laid eyes on her, she “carried his heart away”.
Later in the evening, when Taj’s famous butter chicken is served, the waiter apologises for the teaspoon that juts out from the sauce. They’ve run out of normal spoons, but the waiter needn’t apologise – it gives the impression of eating off a spare cocktail fork after running out of cutlery during a meal shared in a home overflowing with friends and family. It’s likely the exact feeling Katie intended for the evening; that the diners feel as though they have stepped into Emily and Arron’s home, not just their restaurant.
Many of Katie’s artworks correspond with the dishes that arrive on the table throughout the evening. One frame holds a striking drawing of an eggplant, with dimpled, imperfect skin. It corresponds to Arron’s Aloo Baingan, a potato-and-eggplant curry on the set menu that he says is too complex to make during regular dinner service. Katie’s also drawn an individual mussel with such fine detail that its shell appears to still glisten with water. It accompanies Arron’s fragrant coconut curry made with locally sourced mussels. He calls the dish “a taste of home waters”, an intermingling of both Australian and Indian flavours. This sentiment is the recipe for Katie’s artworks: to highlight how food connects us all and remind us that at the dining table, there should be no borders. Because, as she puts it, food is a “universal love language… no matter what language you speak”.
What’s Next?
At the end of the night, after everyone has slowly (and reluctantly) dispersed home, clutching their full stomachs, I ask Katie what is next. “Watch this space,” she tells me. “I have more projects in the planning…one in particular that I am collecting nostalgic food memory stories for.” If readers wish to share a story of a poignant food memory from their lives that they would like to have used as inspiration for Katie’s next collection, they can directly message her on Instagram @food_as_a_love_language.
