Art Chocolate Party

Julia Skinner

Julia’s response to a recipe for chocolate cherry truffles prompted an intriguing question: would the images she drew on the wrappers affect the flavor of the chocolates? She decided to host an event to find out.

In January 2019, she had people over to her house. When she served the chocolates she gave them the following prompts:

-I’ve made these chocolates, and we’re going to spend a moment tasting them and then writing or drawing what they make us think of. You don’t have to be a professional artist to draw pictures-stick figures are totally fine here! 

-Some things to think of as you’re tasting as responding: What flavors come to mind when you eat these? Ingredients or other dishes? And what kinds of memories are associated with those for you?

-What do they make you think of? Do they remind you of a certain place, or time, or person? A song? Something else? Nothing?

-Wow do you feel when you eat them? 

-What do the wrappers make you think of? Do you notice anything noteworthy about them?

Interview by L. Valena

So how did it go?

It was good. I had my partner there, who is a graphic designer and independent film maker, and also had a contemporary art curator and someone who is in food television. So, even though nearly everyone cancelled about an hour before, we still had a good spread.

Well, start from the top. Tell me everything.

I just had them over, and I was envisioning that we would do the activity first, and then just kind of hang out the rest of the night. But, everyone wanted to hang out and chat, and ease into being in a social space first. We just hung out and talked and ate snacks, and then eventually got to the activity. I gave them the prompt, and the chocolates, and I told them I would tell them more about the organization later. I didn't want to give anything away about what was happening, or what they should be thinking about, or how they should be conceptualizing this response. So I gave them each some prompts. And I was expecting them to mostly write out their answers, but they largely drew them.

Cool! That's cool!

One of them drew a Dutch clog, because she said it reminded her of Dutch chocolate. She also did a Godiva gift box, because it reminded her of like fancy truffles that your grandparents would give you. Her grandpa would try to be fancy and give her truffles for Christmas every year, and it reminded her of that. Another friend drew this really beautiful picture of a barn on her cousin's property up in Kentucky, because to her it tasted like cherries and bourbon. So she drew this barn. She said it reminded her of going and spending holidays there, and eating food there. They had a cherry orchard, and it was in Kentucky where they're really into bourbon, so it was really just very reminiscent of this place. So she drew all this stuff that reminded her of that place. There's a cloud in the shape of Kentucky, with a star where the farm is, and there's paisley in the sky, because they had a lot of paisley-patterned textiles in their house. She got really in depth.

Wow!

And then my partner wrote some stuff. He got one of the ones that had a drawing on it of a liquor bottle, and it reminded him a little bit of a Looney Toons kind of thing. But then he said it tasted like chocolate, not like alcohol. Like a fruit, like some kind of cherry chocolate candy he had as a kid. And then he started going on about how it reminded him of Redwall because the animals in those books made all of these crazy desserts, and then he started talking about the video games he was playing at the time he was reading those books. And then he drew a picture of a mouse with a shotgun and a chainsaw.

[Delighted, explosive laughter] YES! Yes. That is EXACTLY the kind of content I'm here for.

It's a very nice drawing- I'm considering putting it on my fridge. He also labeled his response almost like a Star Trek log or something.

Whoa.

So after that we all started talking about the different things that this reminded us of, and he said that he had kind of mashed these three gaming/book references together. And so then we started talking about how all three of the responses could be tangentially related to chainsaws. The barn, of course is on a farm, and you use chainsaws on a farm. The other friend who talked about her Grandfather giving her Godiva chocolates as a give every year- we asked if her Grandfather had a chainsaw. And she said, yes. He did.

That is so wild and cool. I'm thinking that it would actually just be really cool to give the prompt of the word 'Chainsaw' from this whole thing. I think it's really cool that you were all working on this, separately from each other, and you found this commonality between these responses.

[Editor’s Note: The question of how to send along a single word as a prompt was an interesting problem. We ended up sending the next artist the following image of the word, as an attachment.]

Call Number: C13VA | C18EV.skiArt

Dr. Julia Skinner is a food historian, professional fermenter, academic, and mixed media artist living in Atlanta, GA. Her work focuses heavily on community and identity, and she tries to weave in community building and healing into all of her work as a chef, an artist, and beyond. You can find her food related work on social media @rootkitchens and the rest of her work at @bookishjulia