A LOCKWOOD artist will delve into a huge collection of patty pans and emerge with a very different sense of our relationship with food.
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Paul Fletcher will explore the State Library of Victoria's treasure hoard for a project on the significance of the humble baking tools.
Some historians chart the patty pan's emergence back to the 17th century and they once played a prominent role in both Victoria's manufacturing scene.
People still use patty pans for home baking.
Mr Fletcher already has clues that bring historic human connections to patty pans and printing plates to life.
"It's such a simple, mundane, everyday item but there's so many things you can explore from that, related to people's lives, politics, social values, all sorts of things," he said.
Mr Fletcher knows of decorative patty pans celebrating events like the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and old advertisements boasting of a pan "for every occasion".
Food has long been packaged as art and fashion, Mr Fletcher said. People have also seen it as a commodity, a shared resource and as a gift from the land they walk on.
Their relationship with it is changing again with the emergence of localised "circular economies" too. That is another thing Mr Fletcher is curious about.
The state library wants to know more and has awarded him a fellowship to go through its collections.
That will include in the library's Barker Cakoes collection, which contains 4800 items including decorative patty pans made in Melbourne in the 1930s.
They promise to be good inspiration for the sorts of sound, animation and video work Mr Fletcher is known for.
He is one of 13 creatives, writers and scholars awarded fellowships for 2023.
The state library awards them to creatives, writers and scholars bringing new projects to life.
Each of the year-long fellowships comes with funding, a dedicated office in the library's Dome Annulus and a personal librarian to assist research and help unearth treasures in the collection.
Other 2023 fellows include Kaylene Tan.
The writer and director is questioning the Western magicians who have conjured visions of the "mystic East" in large-scale Oriental extravaganzas.
Other fellows are working on projects like a docu-series on the stories of local survivors of Malaya in WW2; photographic works based on Indigenous and non-Indigenous flora; a study of gender and power in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and a series of multimedia stories about the people of regional town Moe.
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
