Earth Day: Food + Flora: Mapping memories of food through our local natural environments and compost ink with Nitesh Tailor
Join us as we explore together our memories of food, imagining them within the constraints of our local natural environments through discussion and mapping.
| Dates | Sat 18 Apr 2026 |
| Times | 1–3pm |
| Space | Terrace Rooms South Wing |
| Price | £15/12 conc |
We’ll begin the workshop with an interactive forum in which we’ll discuss the cultural utopia our memories of food often exist within, food scarcity, and our disconnection from green spaces. This will be followed by a mapping exercise where we’ll reimagine one or more personal memories of food as maps, diagrams, and or flora. For this activity we’ll use Somerset House’s compost ink made from composted exhibition walls to draw onto a fabric made from foraged large leaf plants! This collective tapestry of artworks will be digitised and sent to participants following the workshop.
The compost ink used in this workshop is part of an ongoing experiment in material circulation at Somerset House. Over the past year, the Hempcrete blocks that formed the walls of SOIL: The World at Our Feet, our major exhibition of 2025, have broken down and been combined with used coffee grounds collected from WatchHouse and Café Petiole. Under the guidance of The Land Gardeners, co-curators of SOIL, this mixture has been processed into a nutrient-rich compost. A portion of the compost was then refined, filtered and mixed with natural binders to produce an ink as part of a sustainable, circular approach to material use.
We have set aside a limited number of subsidised tickets for those who cannot afford our ticket prices. If there's also anything you require to help make this workshop more accessible for you and your family (eg. BSL interpreter, visual step by step guide etc.) please let us know by emailing visitor@somersethouse.org.uk or calling +44 (0)333 320 2836.
About Nitesh Tailor
Nitesh Tailor is a London based creative and educator who situates himself in the space in-between artist and artisan. Interdisciplinary in his approaches to making, he often experiments with what he considers presently unfamiliar mediums, combining them with his textile-based craft practice which is rooted in his ancestral homelands of Gujarat. Recently, his explorations have taken him into the worlds of Devanagari calligraphy and earthen building. This has led him to his current research project in which he is investigating how cross and inter caste dynamics in Southern Gujarat effect how Sudra and Casteless peoples are able to exercise personal control. Belonging to a Sudra caste, the Darji, Tailor is unpacking this topic through his memory of his grandmother’s passing focusing specifically on rituals of mourning. Central to his practise are minimally and non-extractive processes of making. Emphasising the local as the starting point for material selection, Tailor often works with the environment around him – that may mean repurposing found objects and old works into new pieces; or as he is currently doing, working with materials which are abundant and cyclical in nature like soil, and tall grasses.