Creating new, unique pasta boards

About the Pasta Workshops
Since June 2023, I have been running pasta-making art workshops that explore how recipes are passed between people through gentle, meaningful exchanges. These workshops consider how personal histories, stories, and traditions are held within the act of sharing food. What does it mean to learn by watching another’s hands? To absorb a recipe through repetition? To carry on tradition through shared gestures?

Collaboration is encouraged—working together to roll, press, and shape your dough in preparation for a shared meal. The freshly made pasta is cooked and served with a sugo made using the artist’s family recipe. We then gather to eat together in a communal dining style, celebrating the act of making and eating as a collective experience.

I absolutely love running workshops, and the pasta sessions are especially meaningful to me as they are closely tied to my personal creative practice. I’ve been fortunate to collaborate on these sessions with organisations including Look Again & Peacock and the Worm, Edinburgh Printmakers, and Sett Studios.

You can find out more about the pasta workshops [here].

About the First Board I Made
The first board I made was created during my final year at Gray’s School of Art and was exhibited as part of my degree show. In the lead-up to the exhibition, I used the board to shape an obscene amount of pasta dough (using around 7kg of flour!)
Once shaped, the pasta was dried and made available for the audience to dispense and take home in small handmade boxes, each containing a secret recipe.

The board itself was made from oak and shaped by hand, with the support of Malcolm—the wonderful technician in the wood workshop at Gray’s. The board was then laser-engraved
with designs that featured throughout my degree show work.

Making New Boards
I’d been wanting to explore how the pasta board could function within my regular pasta workshop setup for some time, and the opportunity finally arose when I was invited to deliver a session with Sett Studios. I decided this was the perfect moment to develop the idea further and began creating designs for a new set of boards.

I wanted these new boards to echo the original pasta board while also reflecting how my practice has evolved since graduating from art school. The designs are a collection of elements from my degree show, sketchbook drawings, and patterns and artwork from SUGO, my first solo exhibition.

The Workshop!

A huge thank you to Caitlin Whitaker for assisting during the workshop and beautifully photographing the event. Thank you also to Sett Studios for their generous support, and to Neil Corall for his help with engraving the boards!

Most importantly, thank you to everyone who joined the recent pasta workshop. I hope you had a brilliant time. It’s always such a joy for me to run these sessions—they’re a deeply meaningful part of my practice, and I’m so grateful you took the time to come along and share the experience with me.