About
Sonia Sandhu and Harry Jelley create memorable multisensory experiences that boldly explore heritage through the senses by bringing together food, art and poetry.
Edible Archives flip etiquette on its head, encouraging audiences to disrupt expected behaviours in spaces that some audiences can find formal.
We encourage a lightness in spaces that often convey seriousness and open up new entry points for heritage engagement by using humour and playfulness. We transform spaces through sound, light and set to support our creative cuisine and create social media moments to be shared for audiences that want a unique and contemporary interaction with archives, heritage, and stories.
We produce encounters that use multiple senses to create a more accessible experience of heritage with varying levels of engagement opportunity. Using taste, smell, sight, touch and sound, we conjure moments to remember, developing our interventions to be accessible for everybody and think explicitly about neurodivergent experiences of our work.
Multi-sensory and accessible storytelling
We use vegan food as a creative tool and story telling device. Previous projects have involved Szechuan pepper, which numbs the mouth, mirroring the disappearance of a stolen artwork, tuilles inspired by goths’ fishnets, and a black tomato leather. Food brings people together and provides a playful, unexpected platform to introduce ideas.
Audio is a significant element of Edible Archives experiences. We weave together audio archives, oral histories, interviews with experts, and our own thoughts to create a storytelling experience that is engaging and evokes the themes we explore.
From the crackling and crunching sound design of Lukas Hornby on Eating Kirkgate Market to shi Blank’s mosher and goth stylings for Eating the Corn Exchange.
Conversation and interviews form the foundation of our audio experiences, bringing together and platforming voices that bring a diversity of perspective together. We bring this conversation together with poetry which may be engraved on cutlery, feature as part of the audio, or be part of the set or physical artwork.
The immersion of the audience in a moment is important to us. On previous projects Jenna Greenwood and Michelle Wren have brought their beautiful skill and craft to create sets that situate the food and audio in place. From Jenna’s handprinted signs and designs to Michelle’s flouroscent taco truck, and the conjuring of William Mitchell’s art studio as an ice cream parlour.