Let’s Talk About Rice
During an artist’s residency in Arita, Japan, where Imari porcelain is produced, Ferrand became fascinated with the masu, a bowl that holds 150 grams of rice, which during the Edo period (1603–1868) was also the currency in which samurai paid the farmers working for them. Though this custom is extinct, the masu is still the measure of how much rice a Japanese person consumes daily. For Ferrand, the shape and meaning of this rice bowl became a starting point to reflect on the state of food in the world and how this could be artistically imagined.
Differences in rice consumption
She initiated research into differences in rice consumption across countries and continents. Using reports by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and Professor Tjeerd-Jan Stomph from Wageningen University, Ferrand mapped per capita rice consumption worldwide.
Her sculptures represent seventeen countries spread around Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and Australia. She discovered to her surprise that in Europe the highest daily rice consumption per capita takes place in Portugal and that a significant amount rice is grown near her native Figueira da Foz. Within Europe, she also selected the Netherlands, where she lives and works, and Italy because it is generally assumed that Italians are big rice eaters, which happens not to be the case.
Her research led her to new findings, which formed the basis for her proposal for a working period at the European Ceramic Work Center (EKWC) in Oisterwijk (NL), where for three months in 2019 she worked toward visualizing her findings in ceramics. She created seventeen handmade sculptures in which she used different varieties of rice and types of clay. The sculptures are ‘vessels,’ containers designed to contain specific amounts of rice, even though they lack this function in practice: they are not utensils. Together they form a graph of worldwide rice consumption. For each continent she chose the country whose inhabitants ingest the most rice per capita and countries with which she feels personally or culturally connected, sometimes deviating from her self-imposed constraints.
Each vessel stands for a different country.
Text: Alex de Vries, Mister Motley 2020.