Studio Orta

To kick start the 40th birthday celebrations of Smiths Row, Lucy + Jorge Orta have been invited to re-imagine 70x7 The Meal in the historic gallery space. 70x7 The Meal, act XXXIII is a visual celebration of food, community and the natural world.

This site-specific installation takes the form of a long and beautiful dinner table set for 42 guests. Focusing on particular regional characteristics of food production and heritage skills, landscape and foraging, wildlife and the web of nature, Lucy + Jorge have crafted an installation that illustrates the poetic relationship between these different aspects of East Anglian culture.

Elements of the table setting have been hand crafted especially for the occasion – a limited edition silk jacquard table runner by Humphries Weaving in Suffolk, the porcelain dinner service by Royal Limoges in France and the bronze candelabra are cast from found olive branches. The motifs in their designs reference the bountiful yet fragile nature of our environment - the bee, the flower bud - and the poetry inscribed onto the artworks are derived from a number of literary and scientific sources on issues surrounding the preservation of our resources: “ Tug at any one thing in nature and the rest will move." (Petrucci)