Pasta Making Workshops
Food is deeply personal, yet it is also something universally experienced, offering everyone a unique and nuanced relationship with it—shaped by culture, memory, and daily life. These pasta workshops invite participants to reflect on what it means to prepare food for others, recognising the time, labour, and care that goes into creating meals. By exploring methods of sharing recipes, the workshops delve into the influence of watching loved ones’ hands at work—kneading, shaping, crafting. For me, this is a shared experience with my mother and her mother, a lineage of Italian cooking that transforms the act of making pasta into an honouring of the past and the people who have shaped who we are today.
The workshops are designed to create a space for open sharing, conversation, and enjoyment. Participants learn to make fresh, vegan pasta using natural dyes, working together in a hands-on and fun process. As the colourful, messy dough slips across boards and tablecloths, they help each other create pasta sheets decorated with patterns, writing, and images. These are then cut into tagliatelle, ready to be cooked. A reflection of the ephemerality of preparing food.
The workshop then moves to a shared meal, where the freshly made pasta is served with sugo, a tomato-based sauce made using my family’s recipe. This meal is a moment of reflection as the pasta is consumed and enjoyed, and conversation observes the process of making food together and the care involved in cooking for others.The workshop highlights how cooking can bring people together and how shared meals help build stronger social connections. Previous workshops have been delivered with the support of Peacock & The Worm and Look Again, and Edinburgh Printmakers.
The workshops are an ongoing socially engaged work and all share the same tablecloth which bears the physical marks of each participant and sprawling stains of the natural dyes used to colour the pasta dough.Background Image: Phoebe McBride
Person using a pasta machine to make colorful homemade pasta, with a bowl of flour nearby.
Two people using a pasta machine in a studio with art on the walls.
Hands mixing flour and blue dye on a wooden board
Group of people engaged in a cooking class, kneading dough and preparing ingredients on a table.
Person making pasta with floral patterns using a pasta machine.
Colorful homemade pasta ribbons on a floured surface.
A person writing in a notebook with a pen while sitting at a table with a plate of pasta and an empty glass. The tablecloth is stained green.
People making homemade colorful pasta on wooden cutting boards, surrounded by flour, bottles, and kitchen tools.
Two people working together at a crafting table, using a pasta machine. The room has artwork and sketches on the walls. A table in front is cluttered with crafting materials, jars, and utensils.
Colorful patterned pasta dough being rolled through a pasta machine, with hands guiding the dough.
(Images: Phoebe McBride Final four images: Erin Donaldson)
Pasta is a small, hand-bound book created to accompany the first iteration of the pasta workshops. Made using a combination of screenprinting and Risograph techniques, the book included the pasta recipe alongside images inspired by research conducted during the development of Sugo. These images captured the process of re-learning pasta-making techniques by observing and documenting others’ hands at work, preserving these moments within its pages.
Printed in a limited edition, each workshop participant received a copy of the book. It also featured a dedicated section for workshop notes, complete with tear-away pages for participants to record their thoughts and experiences. Together, the book and the first iteration of the pasta workshops became the foundation for the Sugo recipe artist book.
Photos: Phoebe McBride
