This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
Sean Nash is a visual artist and food fermentation experimentalist based in Kansas City. His multidisciplinary work often integrates fermented foods with sculptures as socially engaged edible components of programs and exhibitions.
He has had solo shows at the Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis (Krautsourcing, 2019), Plug Projects in Kansas City, MO (Lactobacillus Amongus, 2017), and Black Ball Projects in Brooklyn, NY (They/Them/Their, 2016). Sean is currently working on a commission for the new Kansas City airport that will highlight local farmers through their favorite things to grow.
Sean and I met (virtually, we have yet to meet in person!) through the rich ecosystem of our online fermentation community.
I love the intersection of fermentation and art in my own practice, as well as fermentation in connection with queerness and ecology, so find a lot of overlap between our perspectives and practices. Here, Sean shares his practice and the motivation behind it, and encourages us to take a big-picture, connective view in our creative practice and our lives.
JS: I'd like to start off by asking you to share a bit about yourself and your work. How do you describe yourself as a person and as a creator?
SN: I am a visual artist, food fermentation experimentalist, gardener, home cook, and artistic collaborator who cares deeply about the persistent and continual work of being rooted in body and place. I treat my studio, kitchen, and garden as fluid networked sites of wild creativity, possibility, interaction, agency, reciprocity, and care. My studio practice is informed by the relationships I hold with human and non-human entities, and it tends to the complexities of the worlds we co-create.
As an example: I keep mealworms that eat discarded styrofoam packaging with me in the studio- they are a present lifeform and a meditative reminder I can hear munching away as I make art objects. This sym-poesis (making-with, citing Donna Haraway’s writing) is an intentional cosmology; it is a continual life practice that is reflected in my “solo” artistic work as it specifically honors deep time and the creative ingenuity of our more than human ancestors. Solo is a misnomer because I understand authorship and creative energy to be made of, informed through, or controlled by the non-human and human beings apart from what I call myself.
It’s a relational position, one always entangled with multiples– multiple beings, multiple possibilities… a fractal ontology.
JS: I want to dive right into talking about your creative practice. Where did you start in your practice as an artist, and how has your work evolved into its current form?
SN: That’s a biiiig question! I have early memories being connected to art making, or even to the identity of being an artist from a very early age. Painting and image making could handle the complexity of personal identity, bodies, and representation, and abstraction, so I was compelled as a teenager to paint and draw my nascent queer self. I went on to study painting in college and graduate school, but I like layered and complex puzzles and processes, so in graduate school I began incorporating materials that communicate with different contextual languages.
I like to pick up new skills to engage my curiosity, and I have a strong desire to not get stuck, to improvise, and find thought-spaces beyond the linguistic or so called rational when I’m making. Moments of making can be ignited with sensory, embodied feeling and improvisational trust, but making can also be beautifully mundane and ordinary.
I think that a sense of the ordinary can ground art making or art interpretation and appreciation within an accessible and inclusive social space.
That’s part of how I define my current practice, as a way to acknowledge and interact with people who contribute to culture and steward multispecies relationships, but who may not be in the spotlight for it.
Nurturing artistic practice is equal to supporting all other life practices recognized as necessary for survival and thriving. We don’t all have to do everything- that’s the myth of the self-made, self-sufficient, but I believe in honoring individual pleasures one can have, from knowing how to tune into feeling and sensing and knowing what provides that for you. Turning the compost, planting a seed, mixing a ferment, cooking or eating a great meal, cultivating intimacy, walking the dog, gazing at a tree…these actions or moments (for me) are included in what constitutes an artwork. And, you can call me and my work ecosexual.
JS: You work a lot with fermentation as a part of your artistic practice. What is it about fermentation that lends itself to artistic expression?
SN: In 2014, I attended a food fermentation residency with Sandor Katz with the intention of experimenting with food, fermentation, and social interaction as part of my practice. I was spending time in the studio and in the kitchen in equal measures and felt I needed to understand how those practices were creatively connected for me. Like many people, the flavors of fermented foods captivated me before I knew what fermented foods were or how to make them. The residency helped me envision working with non-artists, or with expanded communities, and I found food fermentation to be an anchor to work with diverse groups of people. Additionally, the realization that we are made of at least as many microbes as human cells in number– this engendered a shift in my thinking that has shaped my work and life for the last eight years.
The first art pieces I created with food fermentation were included in a solo exhibition titled They/Them/Their in 2016. I am a trans man, and at the time I was starting to use nonbinary pronouns to refer to myself (I now use he/him/his) and was thinking deeply and particularly about gender binaries in parallel with food fermentation. I made connections between fermented foods and embodied realities, and I came to know other artists and scholars working at the intersections of food, fermentation, and feminism. In 2017 I co-authored “Queer Bodies and Bubbling Microbes: Dispatches from the Foundation for Fermentation Fervor” with Stephanie Maroney and it was included in Fermenting Feminism, edited by Lauren Fourner, that year. I have continued collaborations with Stephanie and Lauren, and enjoy the bubbling world of trans*inclusive feminist fermentation activity and scholarship.
Fermentation appears literally and metaphorically in my work as a lively social and edible material. For They/Them/Their I invited New York fermentation community members to include their own ferments on a shelf in the exhibition and they were eaten along with the ferments from the sculptures at a closing event. I have continued to involve the public by inviting people to show up with ferments and stories for various projects, by offering workshops in conjunction with exhibitions and projects, or by offering free ferments as refreshment for opening or closing events.
The presence of fermentation tends to elicit questions about what’s living or what isn’t in the context of an artwork. I find that compelling, perplexing, and disorienting with respect to “stable” categories and distinct or clear boundaries. The work then questions the visible by including or accounting for the invisible (to the naked eye) as an actant. Fermentation sculptures are turned on or activated by fermented foods, and the foods have a temporal and performative function through being consumed.
One project I am continuing to work on is titled “transfermentation” and is open to all trans* identified fermenters, or those who want to ferment. It is a virtual correspondence project that puts us in touch with one another and involves making the same ferment together via a virtual conference. The ferment sits with each of us over time, allowing for our questions and conversation to ferment in the jar with it. We continue to correspond regarding its changes and our thoughts, which can be related to intimate, personal, vulnerable, or speculative musings on trans identity and fermentation. We get back together when possible to taste the final ferment and compare tasting experiences. The entire project is documented through photos, text, and video.
JS: Tell me a bit about the other media you use. How do these intersect and interact in your work? What affordances does each medium offer us for creative expression?
SN: I use paint and sculptural materials such as composite resins and putties. I use silicone to cast and make multiples of different forms (mostly vegetables). I blend and dye kombucha scoby pulp for kombucha leather and cast it (in the vegetable casts). I keep boxes of things that would otherwise be discarded: sawdust, produce netting, eggshells, mulch, coffee.
I experiment with these materials in conjunction with a binder to construct new sculptural forms. I think the intersection of these materials relates to the sensibility I was discussing earlier- it’s a nod to multiple ways and methods of seeing, sensing, and relating. It is a queering of materials, a bewildering that loosens expectations and normative functions. My use of materials raises questions, or at least offers fluidity, regarding discipline and disciplines. Different media can be a conduit for memories, sensations, and environments or ecologies. I think visual language can be in accordance with or discordant from aesthetic expectations, and it is usually some reverberation of the discordant that sticks with us.
JS: I always love hearing people's answers to this question, so I'm asking you, too: What book (or books) are you reading right now? If you could read all the books you wanted, but there was only one book you would be able to re-read, which book would you pick?
SN: I’m reading “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals” by Saidiya Hartman. I recommend it 1000%.
With regard to your second question, I think I have to choose something verging on encyclopedic, so if you’re making me choose just one, I’ll pick Sandor Katz’s “The Art of Fermentation.”
JS: Anything else you'd like to tell me?
SN: I’m currently working on a piece titled "Kansas City Reciprocity," a four by sixteen foot sculptural painting commissioned for the Kansas City International Airport, opening in 2023. The piece represents six local farmers by depicting their favorite things to grow in a shimmering and kinetic composition of vegetables. The plants multiply, migrate, and relate to one another across the panoramic piece, reflecting diasporic interaction between plants, seeds, people, and cultures across the globe. My process for "Kansas City Reciprocity" began by contacting and visiting the six farmers (including individuals, families, and a community garden) based in the KCI airport growing region. They are: Young Family Farm, Longfellow Community Garden, Sankara Farm, Maseualkualli Farms, Ki Koko Farms, and the Buffalo Seed Company. They are represented by okra, tomatoes, buena mulata pepper, jicama, long beans, and Cherokee white corn, respectively. Cucumbers and pickles travel through the entire piece as a representation of my favorite thing to grow and ferment and are also symbolic of my trans identity.
I have been visiting these farms during the 2022 growing season to have discussions with the growers, to help out, to document their crops, and to taste a delightful array of plants directly at the farms. A gardener myself, I put my gardening on hold this season in order to get to know this region and our foodways through the beautiful land-based practices of a handful of our small farmers. "Kansas City Reciprocity" will introduce airport travelers to a group of growers and dedicated community gardeners that nourish us in our region- physically and spiritually.
I specifically chose BIPOC and LGBTQ farmers to work with in order to foreground Midwestern foodways and food histories not solely centered around dominant big agriculture and settler colonial narratives. The piece celebrates the importance of and connection to diverse land-based practices and generational knowledge keepers in the Kansas City region.
In the studio, I have been casting multiples of the vegetables using pigmented composite resin that are adhered to large wooden panels before I cover the wooden panels with a painted fabric. The piece will have a QR code so that visitors can access more about the growers, agroecology, and KC foodways on my website.
Sean’s website is www.senash.com and you can find him on Instagram @nashse
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