Maddy Wilson in conversation with the artist duo @publickknowledge , Fatima Butt and Maya Campbell Todd on their community centred art workshops that deal with sharing cultures, consumption and licking.
Full article out tomorrow.
a pot / a chosen ingredient / a chance to pause / a gathering
Bring one ingredient and a story to share and simmer.
Together we’ll cook a broth and enjoy a collaborative nourishing lunch.
This event is open for Ruskin School of Art students only - keep your eyes peeled as we will be opening up to the wider community soon!
12.00-14.00
Project Space
Ruskin School of Art (Bullingdon Road)
Sign up using the link in our bio
lots of love,
Maya and Fatima
Hello! We are Fatima and Maya, two MFA candidates currently at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
Butt’s research examines the colonization of the subcontinent’s soil through consumption, decay, and reclamation. Working with henna, potatoes, and turmeric, she draws on their domestic, agricultural, and trade histories. Moving away from academic hierarchies, she turns to recipes, conversations, and diasporic memory as sites of knowledge, questioning what it means to co-exist with growth and rot.
Todd’s practice spans image, material and text; exploring the body as a porous, affective site where memory and emotion circulate. She focuses on crying and weeping as moments when inner states become external, blurring boundaries between self and world. Todd treats tears not as symbols but as active, embodied matter - leaking, staining, crystallising, evaporating and leaving traces while remaining in flux. Her work attends to these subtle residues of affect, often in domestic spaces, where emotions settle into surfaces almost imperceptibly. Across her practice, she asks how affect can be made visible without becoming fixed. By focusing on these lingering substances, she explores how bodies and materials remain entangled within historical power structures, and how weeping can be understood not just as loss, but as a connective process across time.
Publick Knowledge is a collaborative project using food as both material and method. Through shared cooking and eating, we explore flavour as memory, labour and inheritance.
Each gathering is collective, unfolding as a living archive shaped by those present. Originally hailing from Pakistan and Ireland respectively, we are interested in how food systems can transcend borders and bring communities together. We look forward to welcoming you to our table!
Public Knowledge is a community-centred cooking and eating research group by Fatima Butt and Maya Todd. Through shared workshops, we approach food as material - thinking through consumption, decay, labour and inheritance. What remains is not waste, but trace: of flavour, memory and connection, where what is taken in and what is left behind are held together.
