Exploring food and celebration
Around two hundred participants from the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Southwark worked with visual and sound artists, a sculptor, a storyteller, drama specialists, a photographer, textile artists, a film-maker, a deaf poet and a musician.
The creative team included children and their carers from SureStart groups, elders, university students, adults with learning disabilities, young deaf adults and primary school children.
Personal 'recipe stories'
As well as sewing representations of food, the elders' groups reminisced about recipes that contributed towards an ambient soundscape playing in the exhibition space.
Their stories were turned into a series of 'personal recipe stories'; one example is shown in the right-hand column called 'Away with the fairies'.
HM Queen Elizabeth II visits
HM Queen Elizabeth II visited the exhibition and met some of its participants while at the Tower of London to officially reopen Tower Hill on 9 July 2004.
Christina Chu and Sam Hill – from Harbinger Primary School on the Isle of Dogs – talked to Her Majesty about the design and production of the 'listening throne', created from the children's own designs and incorporating their whispered ideas on 'If I were king or queen...'
Following the exhibition visit, a group working with the Half Moon Young People's Theatre from Stepney, using props they had designed and made themselves on the theme of food, performed for The Queen and other invited guests.
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