Amy Lawrence
SHARING PLATTER
Collaborative food and eating club SHARING PLATTER is a delicious collection of gentle and experimental creative gatherings, curated for women and non-binary people of colour, centring relationships to food, identity and pleasure.
This nourishing learning and sharing space will encourage you to eat as messy or as slow as you like, whilst connecting with new people. Together we’ll explore ideas around Gathering and Picking and how this speaks to sensation, memory and most importantly, pleasure and slowness in the winter months. Part conversation, interactive workshop and eating-club, we’ll welcome local community-centred food, growing and herbal specialists to co-create this creative gathering of food, eating and sharing.
We’ll gather around a hand-made fake marble table, inspired by a piece that SHARING PLATTER artist Amy Lawrence inherited from her Nanna.
Through the lens of ancestral food and eating practices that are vulnerable to political, economic and ideological pressures, SHARING PLATTER combines the experimental with creative and tasty expressions of resistance and celebrations of identity.
An ode to the ancestors, encouraging connection and storytelling through food.
PROGRAMME
PART 1: GATHERING AND FINDING
Herbalism and Tea Making with Matilya Njau
We’ll welcome you into the space with a comforting herbal drink custom made by Matilya whilst we get to know each other around the table. Matilya will lead a welcome ritual, and share their knowledge and interests, including local herbs and growing, whilst taking us on a journey through tea making and remedying.
Gut Cultivation: Gut meditation and journaling session with Amy Lawrence
Remembering moments of ‘finding’ in our bodies.
PART 2: PICKING AND PREPPING
Trust Your Gut: Setting the table with Sonia Sandhu
We join Sonia for a collaborative spice blending session contributing to a communally cooked ‘late lunch’ of delicious dahl and tasty sides
Let’s Eat!
An Eating Club shared lunch, a sharing platter galore.
PART 3: LEFTOVERS
Memory Capsule: Essential Oils with Mica Ray
A short introduction to Mica’s practice of combining essential oils for wellness and remedying. Throughout the day, Mica will create a bespoke essential oil for each guest to take home as a response to and reflection of the day.
Goodie Bag by SHARING PLATTER
Guests will leave with a bag of goodies to remember the day.
Hot drinks and seasonal SHARING PLATTER nibbles prepared by Sonia Sandhu will be available throughout the day.
About the SHARING PLATTER team
SHARING PLATTER is a collaborative, curatorial food and eating project founded by Amy Lawrence (she/her). Amy is an artist and creative producer from Lancashire, based in Glasgow. Her creative practice is an approach to storytelling as a surreal and archival practice using multiple visual and experimental performance and choreographic outcomes within a social ‘gathering’ practice. Her work often exists in challenging spaces such as outdoors at night, in busy public areas and often challenges institutional frameworks in place and at play.
Amy returns to Leeds in 2024 as part of her 3 years development of SHARING PLATTER. In 2022 Amy developed Hungry Ghosts across Leeds City Centre, which included the Black Eating Club an alternative supper club, VENDING a vending machine of food stories by local artists in Leeds and Festival of festival, a day long tribute to the humble sweet dumpling.
Matilya Njau
Matilya is a gardener by trade and at the heart of their practice is helping people reconnect with their immediate surroundings, creating green spaces in difficult places and using gardening and herbal medicine as a vessel to connect with self, ancestors and other human and non-human beings. The questions that drive Matilya’s work are; what relationships do we need to build with plants in order to address climate and food justice? What do plants teach us about ourselves and others? How do our ancestors speak to us through the non-human world? How can green spaces act as vehicles for connection, rest and therapy? Website: mimea.org.uk
Mica Ray (she/her)
Mica is a holistic therapist, practising massage, reflexology, aromatherapy and Reiki. She focuses on supporting her clients through their individual journeys, working towards their healing and wellness goals. Mica creates bespoke aromatherapy blends and treatment packages to suit particular conditions and needs. She uses and practises techniques such as mindfulness, sound healing, and energy healing to promote relaxation, reduce stress and bring a state of balance to the body and mind. Socials: @essential.rays
Sonia Sandhu (she/her)
Sonia is a Bradford born & based chef, artist and producer. Her plant forward menus are global-inspired, thoughtfully prepared, seasonal and vibrant. She was a founding member and kitchen manager of Bread+Roses cafe in Bradford, and has successfully run pop up supper clubs since 2016. She has catered for retreats, gatherings, gigs, weddings, theatre and installation art shows, and teaches regular mindfulness through bread-making classes with sanctuary seekers. She is co-director / co-lead artist of Edible Archives, an emerging arts company, creating multi-sensorial art installations which incorporate telling heritage stories through playful menus, sound and set.Instagram: @hungry_sonia / @edible.archives Website: ediblearchives.co.uk
Access
- Leeds Kirkgate Market is wheelchair accessible.
- If you have any questions about access at this event, please contact yasmin@compassliveart.org.uk.
Language
‘People of Colour’ (also known as POC) is a self-identifying term. SHARING PLATTER is currently using this term and is a POC only space. We acknowledge the limitations of acronyms and terminology. We understand that not all racialised people will use this term in relation to their identity. We use POC/people of colour to include people who identify as structurally racialised including Black, Asian, Mixed-race, Multiple heritage, East, South-East Asian, West Asian, African, African-Caribbean, Caribbean, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, or First Nations, and these diasporas. We use this term to identify that SHARING PLATTER is a closed space, with the aim to address and overcome systemic barriers that people face directly or indirectly based on their racial or national identities, race or perceived racial identities and/ or the colour of their skin.
This space is only for those who identify as People of Colour in the Global Majority and women, trans women, non-binary, gender non-conforming, two-spirited, agender, intersex and gender fluid people.
Amy Lawrence and collaborators, Black Eating Club, 2022. Photo: Sophie Okonkwo, Sable Studio
