October 23, 2023 • 42 mins
In this episode, Ruthie talks with Es Devlin about her visionary stage designs for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Yves Saint Laurent, The Crucible, U2 at the Sphere, and much more. She also shares her love of food and explains why a restaurant—and the world—is a stage.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, are we okay for noise? By the way, it's
Friday night.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's Friday, Friday night, It's Friday night. We should do
something that was so fine the night?
Speaker 1 (00:12):
It wasn't that all right? I know? Just to sing?
What did we? We?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Sang?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Still my escape going in June of this year. I'm
completely unsure about what to do with Damien Hirst's beautiful
(00:41):
studio space next to the River Cafe, which he was
giving to us for the memorial for Richard Rogers. My husband,
a friend, Jonah Freud, introduced me to s Devlin by text.
A few hours later, I found myself talking to her
while she put her child to bed at midnight. S
the design of the set for Beyond his concert, the
West End production of the Crucible, the fashion show for Youth.
(01:04):
Saint Laurent had recently finished her radical book in Atlas
of s Stevlin. At the end of the conversation, she said,
I'll tell you what, Ruthie, I'm going to Lisbon tomorrow morning.
Why don't I stop over on the way to the
airport is eight o'clock oka, of course, s I said,
already exhausted. She arrived at day on the dot we've
had a look at the space. She told me what
(01:25):
to do and got straight into a taxi to make
the flight. This was s spontaneous, generous, positive, creative, funny
and very smart. As I write this, S is in
the restaurant talking to Charles pull and our manager about
what makes the River Cafe a set a place that
is active and calm, dark and light, noisy and quiet
(01:46):
at different times of the day. When it comes back
from all this, we'll talk about food, theater, space, books,
family and cooking, and most of all, we will talk
about friendship, and we will talk about love.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Thank you, Yes it's beautiful. Don't change a word.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So you know the drills. And we asked you to
choose from all the recipes of all the books from
the last twelve cookbooks. So I'd like ask you why
you chose this recipe for kanelini bean soup.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
But this is from the first book. And of course
my first encounter when the River Cafe first was open,
when I was first able to come, which took a
while to get my table, and then when the book
came out and we were fans, so I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
And well back then it.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Was probably me in France read before I met my
husband Jack. But my husband Jack is an extraordinary cook.
He makes this canelini bean soup and he makes it
very specifically with a piece of toast in the bottom.
And he did teach me how to make it. So
I have made it okay, but more often I have
eaten it and that it didn't make it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I The recipe canellini bean soup. Serve six two hundred
and fifty grams cooked cannellini beans, a handful of fresh
sage leaves, two to three garlic cloves, peeled and chopped,
three tablespoons of olive oil, a bunch of fresh flat
(03:23):
leaf parsley chopped extra virgin olive oil in a large saucepan.
Cook the garlic in the olive oil until soft but
not brown. Add the parsley, then add beans and stir.
Put three quarters of the bean mixture into a food
processor with some reserved cooking liquid. Pulse briefly. You do
not want to pure. Add more of the cooking liquid
(03:46):
if necessary, but the soup should be thick. Return to
the saucepan and season. Reheat if too thick, add more
cooking liquid. Serve with generous amount of extra virgin olive oil.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
And perhaps some toast.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And I would if I were Jack, I would be
toasting something in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
So you have that gorgeous toast and beans and oil.
So we love threems three ingredients, isn't it? You know, simplicity,
which I guess is perhaps the way you work it is.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
And also I don't eat meat, so and I, as
you mentioned, I use quite a lot of energy, so
I have to be quite careful to make sure I
get a lot of protein without eating meat. And the
beans are amazing for that as well.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
So, going back to the beginning, tell me about growing
up in the Devlin household. Where were you born?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I was born in Kingston Hospital in Kingston upon Thames,
not too far from here, proper suburbia, proper suburbia in
the western suburbs of London. And then my parents went
on a romantic weekend break to Rye in East Sussex,
and they bought a house on a whim on a
cobbled street called Mermaid Street which used to descend into
(04:57):
the sea. And the house had been lived in by
Conrad Aiken the poet and his daughter Joan Akin, the author.
So in my mind, the house spoke. There was a
model city, model town of Rye next to the house,
and we used to visit it every weekend because my
(05:18):
mother and father were so excited to invite their friends
to see the place they loved, so they would take
them to the model, which was a sone Lumier and
it told stories. So each house told a story, including
my house. So I was only six years old, so
in my head something made me think that objects could speak,
(05:39):
houses could speak the way that I think bean speak
and food speaks. So that was me growing up. And
my mother was a teacher.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
What did she do.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
She taught special needs children, dyslexic children. At that time,
she had taught lots of things, but she was teaching
dyslexic kids. And my dad was a journalist specializing in education.
They were both fascinated with education, actually, But my mom
prepared all the food. My dad could make scrambled eggs
on toast, that was really it. I'm worried that I
might be like my father was slightly known for only
(06:12):
cooking one thing. Okay, because I don't get very much.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
That's fine, what is your one thing?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, I do make cheese and tomatoes, on toast quite well,
if it's good toast, and I sometimes put red pepper.
I'm trying to use the vegan cheese.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Are you vegan and vegetarian?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now I'm vegetarian, but I'm just trying to be as
smart as possible with the ingredients. But yeah, my mum
was in the kitchen. She was trying to manage everything.
There were four kids, four and she taught all day
and then he came home and cooked. Yeah, would you
sit down, all of you to do Yeah, every year.
But it was quite a lot of you know, back
then in the eighties and late seventies, quite a lot
of potato waffles, the freezer, whatever she had time for.
(06:54):
Then she got a slow cooker and she realized that
before she went to work, she could put all the
ingredients big meaty stews she could put.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
She would do a.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
White one or a brown one, and she put all
the ingredients of the chicken or whatever it was in there.
In the morning, she'd go out do her whole day teaching,
and then we would come home from school. The idea
was that the big stew would be there for us
to eat, and that worked well, no, because we liked
the potato waffles, so we would just go to the
freezer and get poor mam so she gave up after
(07:25):
that a bit.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
So your father would come back. Would he work in London?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, we only saw him at the weekend because he
would stay up in London to get to Rye at
the time, it's quite a track, so he would come
back at the weekends. So my mum was really holding
the four and we we all did a lot of things.
There was music lessons orchestra. We had a little yellow
citron Diane that we had to park facing downhill on
(07:51):
Mermaid Street, otherwise it wouldn't start if it was facing
uphill because then if it if it didn't start, you.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Could just roll it down.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
She would put hot water bottles on it in the
winter to stop the points freezing. She had a little
plastic like a bonnet that you put on to stop
your hair getting wet. In the shower. She put one
of those over the whole car, a big bonnet to
stop it getting wet. But we would go to the
beach after school in the summer every day, to camber
Sands or to Winchelsea and we would My food memory
(08:20):
of that time I was sitting usually crappy weather, in
the wind and unwrapping foil crusty little pastries, and then
the sand, the grit of the sand would get in them,
and she would make these little pastry chicken pies. So
I remember the chicken in the sand. They were kind
of tasty with a bit of sand in them.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So you grew up in this house with four children,
where are you in the list of number two? Number two?
And the mother who worked, a father who was absent,
and you had a meal every night that you would
sit around the table and would you all talk about
what you've done during the day, just eat and then
do the homework.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Was noisy, very noisy, and kind of My brothers went
to boarding school for a while. I think it was
all too much, probably for my mum to manage four
kids at once, so they went off for a bit
and they would come back in the holidays and it
was very, very noisy, and there were friends over, and yeah,
it was food and noise and talking.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And at lunch, would you take your lunch to school?
Did you get lunch school food?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
School food? Yes? Oh yes, oh yes. School food was
horrible rice puddings that were all skinny, and you had
to eat it all. It was a local school called
Frieda kardam in Rye Primary School, and then we moved
to Kent to go to a school called Cranbrook School,
which was a grammar school. They had a little cafeteria
(09:43):
that you would choose your food, but we just did
eat the potato waffles.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And came back to the I'm afraid it's such a
shame because I've never seen a potato. I guess I
have to go through the British education system had a potato.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yes, I mean, in fairness to my mum, the the
fact that you know, we were annoying children who liked
processed food was not her fault. She's a fantastic cook.
She makes great big themed I mean, she would make
ridiculously crazy birthday cakes, theatrical, perhaps extraordinarily the I mean.
My mum's a great artist, as is my dad. They
didn't pursue art as her career, but all of our
(10:18):
birthdays were always it would be a themed mermaid cake
with mermaid biscuits. I am I'm pretty terrible because I
do when I eat a meal, and I've been served
the most beautiful meals in my life by my husband
and others, But I tend to eat the conversation. Yeah,
the food tastes of the thought. That's fine, that's a story.
(10:39):
That's a story of food. And I think food can
be a story. And I think you know, what you
eat is so much obviously more than what's going in
your mouth. And the lighting. I am obsessed with what
the light is. I can't if I walk into a restaurant,
the light is where I will probably go up to
the person's say, can I just dim this switch here?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
So what is the lighting that you like? Low? Low?
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Or outside and being in the like just now, we
were sitting outside your beautiful piazza. So either natural light
or the light of the fire. Yeah, by the fire,
the food by a fire.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I'm Charles Pullan, executive director of the River Cafe, and
we are sitting on the table one oh six on
the terrace outside on a Friday afternoon, and I'm about
to talk with es Devlyn. Very exciting. We want to
get her take on the feel and the energy and
the design of the River Cafe. So rather than one
of her sets that we do all over the world,
(11:35):
be rather interesting just for us to hear what your
take is on the space that we use. As people
arrived through the front door, their first view as they
look left down the length of the very long dining
room is that it's the big pink word oven than
the fire in there flickering away, which has a wonderful
purpose of shrinking the room in a way and making
it feel cozy and make it feel much more intimate
(11:57):
despite the facts it is a very long, large dining room.
It's such a such a sort of hackneyed old reference,
the fact that there is so much in common with
the theater and the restaurant world. But it's a truism
because there are so many parallels with how you gear up,
you rehearse your audition, but then there's the energy that
just before service, just before the curtains up, and then
(12:19):
you all jump into your roles. And so we've always
talked about the staff and the food and all that
side of things. But from your point of view, it
might be interesting to hear how the kind of design
of the dining room itself comes into play.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I think the comparison between the performative aspects of the
delivery of food and the physical aspects of being backstage
and front stage are clear. I don't find them hackneyed.
I think they're fascinating. When I was here last time,
it was an evening. The weather was a bit like this,
maybe not so sunny, but we all gathered in bright
(12:54):
clothes in honor of Richard's love of bright colors, all
around the banks of this piazza, and.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Of course the river. It's called the River car favor reason.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We are adjacent to this great planetary force that runs
through our city. So for me, those fundamental forces of
the fire in the bright crimson furnace, and the river
that's here, this green piazza of grass that's outside, the
vivid color of the doors everywhere in the toilets, this
(13:25):
beautiful red orange fluorescent color. Right, So, I think all
of those energies are felt even when you're inside. We're
sitting outside now, but I believe they're felt inside as well.
And of course the color that the idea that when
you eat, you're not just eating food, you're eating color.
You're eating light because the way that light reverberates off
(13:46):
objects to create color. You're eating what you smell, You're
eating the conversation that you might be having with someone.
That's what you're eating. That's what you're nourished by. So
much more than molecules that you need is fuel, right,
and that's this place has always celebrated that. And of
course what's beautiful about it in my understanding of the
etymology of this restaurant and why it's so duly loved,
(14:10):
is because it began as a place of work, didn't
It began as a canteen to feed those who were
working together to make buildings.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
The paper tape cloth here is absolutely was here so
that Richard could get out its pens and squibble on
them and design the next compute, whatever it might have been.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
And I think that's why it feels so rooted in
this spot. It's here for more reasons than one might think,
even on the surface. Of course, now it's become this
incredibly sought after place to have some of the finest food,
with the finest produce, with some of the most successful
and accessible and readable and beautiful cookbits that have ever
been made. But it started because a team at lunch
(14:52):
time needed to eat in a place where there aren't
many restaurants. And it started from we always talk about
in any kind of work of art, what was the
need it need to be made, and this needed to
be made, like Ruthie and Richard needed to be together,
like you know, their need of each other sort of
resonated through all their friends and the vast kind of
circle of people they've gathered around them, which I really
(15:14):
witnessed when I was here on that the way.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I understand that you cook for the people that you
work with as any yeah every day.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah so I don't cook, but I have a cook
who makes meals every day. And we started that probably
about seven years ago when we moved to a studio
that didn't really have an easy way for people to eat.
But also it was part of balancing our carbon footprint
and it seemed much more sensible. If I have around
eight to ten people in the studio every day, we
(15:49):
make them vegetarian food. There's no food waste, there's no packaging,
no one's running around getting bits of things in plastic
boxes or anything. But it was what's something I could do.
You know, we still fly. I can diminish it, but
I can't completely get rid of that from my practice
at the moment. But what I can do is serve
everyone a really nice vegetarian all eat together. Yeah, we
will stop work. We go around the table in my house,
(16:11):
there's a garden there. We all sit down and we eat.
We have a wonderful lady called Chia who's cooking for
us at the moment. We had Antonio until she had
to leave. But that's really important for me that we sit,
we talk to each other, we eat great food.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I think that again, how you combine work food. You
know that people who need to go out and go
for a walk to stop the people the idea of
the business lunch where you go to a restaurant and
you discuss work, which was an anathemat It rends a
piano Richard's partner. He thought, I remember when they were
doing the Pompa. It was like either you ate or
(16:45):
you worked. You never would, you know, combine the two,
you know, the idea of enjoying a meal while you
talked about work, you continue the work of the meal or.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Usually not normally, we just talk about stuff we want
to talk about. It's not working over lunch. And everyone
goes out for a walk after lunch because we're near
Dulwich Park, so people go out, they wander off, they
get a coffee, they have all break but normally know
the conversation. Either we're silent. Sometimes sometimes we just need
a break and we will sit there. We're happy in
each other's company, just eating. We're very happy to say nothing.
(17:17):
Or we just chit chat about any old thing that's
nothing to do with work. Or we invite people to lunch.
A lot of the time there are a lot of
kids who want to see the studio who might not
otherwise experience what a studio is like. So we're busy,
but we're always stopping for lunch. So we say come
to lunch, so they come. They get the vibe. Everyone's
(17:39):
not panicking because they're not meant to be working. It's
a time for a break.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
And you're quite solitary.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I love being on my own. I love reading. I
always draw when I read. I write when I read,
I draw, I have to underline. I can't read without
a pen in my hand. I love it on my own,
but I don't spend very much time on my own
because I have two children out and I have eight
people in my studio minimum, so I'm rarely on my own,
so I really cherish it when I am.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Because we were talking the other day about artists and alcohol,
and drinking and going out and being together in the
evening because so many artists are alone during the day
that then when it's sort of over, you want to
kind of go out to be out. Did you have
that period in your life before you had children you
were working and then partying.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, I mean I think the time when I moved
to London, when I was at early teens. You know,
it was magical. My boyfriend at the time was.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sixteen is young.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I was young.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Well your parents were fine with that.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
And not really no. Yeah, I was kind of determined
in what I wanted to do, and it was music.
My boyfriend at the time was a record producer and
a sound engineer, so I was with a lot of
musicians and I spent a lot of time in recording studios,
just observing how music is made, how tracks are recorded,
how music is edited. That was a really formative time
(19:01):
to get under the skin of recording in music. And
then when I was in Bristol, that was probably my
most party time. That was my hallucinogenic moment.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Tell me about then when you left home.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I was about sixteen and I fell in love with
a man who was twenty four. I did finish school.
But I spent a lot of time in London.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Has that a domestic situation? Did you live in a
house and have to cook and shop for yourself?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
But we do. You know, we had hardly ever been
to a restaurant when we didn't go to restaurants ever,
we didn't have the money for kids in a restaurant,
and restaurants in England at the time, it wasn't the
same thing that we're talking about. Well, as I was
growing up in the seventies and eighties, we never went
to a I can remember going to a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Once special occasion, or I think it.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Was because the car broke down and we went and
it had red walls and the parmesan was off. That's
all I remember about a restaurant. So the first time
I really remember going to restaurants was when I was
sixteen and I met my boyfriend and he would take
me out in London to restaurants and we went to
Mister Wing and we ate duck pancakes. It's an Earl's
Court and Julie's restaurant and those were the rest and
(20:10):
I was like, wow, this is crazy.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, so you ate in restaurants and maybe cooked for
yourself or yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Then I did do a bit of cooking, and I
would have been at university when I got your book.
I didn't have any furniture. I had a wooden palette
on the floor and I put cushions around it. And
I would try and make the River Cafe recipes. That
was when I first got the blue book.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And then you cooked your way through university? Did you
stay there? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, and I did cook. Then I would eat veggie
burgers in the cafe. Vegetarian at that I wasn't. No,
I just like the veggie burgers. I wasn't vegetarian. Then
I would make chicken. I would do tie dinners, and
I would get the galangle and lime and coconut milk
and make chicken coconut milk soup. I would do that.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So when you left Bristol, and what did you do?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
When I left Bristol, I had been writing, as you do.
I was doing an English literature degree, so I was
reading and writing, reading, reading, writing for three years. But
I also wanted to paint, so I painted a lot.
I painted my whole house, which was rented.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Murals on the walls.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah wow. And it was a rented apartment, and it
had a shag pile carpet that I ripped off. It
was disgusting, had carpet all over the side of the bath.
So I took all the carpets away and painted on
the floor great big murals and painted a lot of
I made a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Did your landlord ever stop by to visit?
Speaker 2 (21:28):
No?
Speaker 1 (21:28):
In trouble.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
When I left, I had to put it all. I
had to get a new shag pile carpet, put it back.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So underneath some person's apartment, you should go back there
and lift up the carpet. Discovery and Michelangelo under under canvas,
you know.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Have a look in number one three five cotton brow
one three nine. I can't remember, but so I wanted
to make art there. And I went to Saint Martin's
and I did the foundation course.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
After the university, I did it all back front. It's
not bad to have one education and then have another.
I wasn't ready to go to art school.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Although I'd always made art at school, I wasn't ready
to go to art school, not least because if you
went to art school you had to stay living at home. Yeah,
And I wanted to move. I wanted to live in Bristol,
so yeah, I went to Saint Martin's and had the
most you know, rich year of just I was. I
was a mature student by then. Everyone else was eighteen.
(22:26):
I was twenty one and quite old. So I did
everything there. You really got into photography, printmaking, sculpture, made
a lot of books. I sowed a book. I decided
a book had to be made completely stitched. And then
people kept saying to me, oh, you really should check
out this theater design course.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
A'd sat minds There was a.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Specific one called Motley Theater Design Course, which was run
by a ninety three year old lady called Percy Harris,
who's a bit of a legend in the world of
stage design. And I said, I don't really care about theater.
It's quite boring. I never sit through and was asleep,
or it's a music it's kind of embarrassing. Want to
do theater? And they said, no, no, just go and
check out this course. And I walked in and it
(23:06):
was this red room, smell of pot noodle. Definitely saw
a mouse.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And where was it. It was in the.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Scene dock of the theater Royal Drury Lane at the time,
there was Miss Saigon. So every night you would hear
the helicopter coming down, and it was just ten students,
pretty much feral, slightly smelly. They hadn't left that room
for a year.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
They were just in and they were making. They had
little model theaters, they were listening to opera. There was
references and photographs and painting stuck all over the wall.
And I felt, I thought, this is my tribe. I'm
happy and I've never really left that room. In a way.
Whatever I'm making, it's in a room. My room now
is kind of like that. It's covered in stuff, Piles
(23:51):
and piles of books, tons of little drawings and pictures
all over the wall, lots of little sculptures, quite magical,
lots of miniatures.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
You have a beautiful voice. Did you sing? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I did try and say occasion, I was so bad.
Funnily enough, I've learned to use my voice a bit now.
When I make sculptures, I speak in them. But about
tell me more about that?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Well, there's a work that's on in Miami at the
moment called Forest of Us and it starts as a
small film with me talking. Really just noticing the similarity
between the shape of human lungs and the shape of trees,
and just observing that. Then the film comes apart and
you walk into a sculpture that reverberates that observation. But
(24:38):
when I first made these types of works in twenty sixteen,
I would never have used my voice.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Like a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
If I heard my voice on an answering machine back
in the day when we had answers, I've been back.
Oh God, I don't sound like that. That's weird. I
sound you know, that's terrible that I got used to
it when I used to read my children's stories when
I put them to sleep, and I got used to
the different quality of sound. If I had one of
their heads on my chest, my voice sounded different, and
(25:07):
I got used to that, and I kind of became
comfortable with my own voice around.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Then, stories and boys and theater and designing the story
of your growing up, decorating the cakes to going to
Bristol and cooking Thai food and putting murals under carpets.
It's all about discovery and trying to find the story
with the theme underneath it. And then food is the same.
You have the ingredients. You try and think how you
(25:35):
can respect the ingredient, the simplicity of the ingredient, if
you're a vegetarian, if you're vegan, if you're trying to
do something with or without. It always is that kind
of restraint which then leads to the richness, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I think so when I think everything that you're just
describing there is also about seeking a very basic human
need for being participant in ritual. Yeah, and we were
talking actually a little earlier about river, caffe and ritual.
And you've got all the ingredients here for ritual. You
have the river, you have the fire, you have that
piazza of grass, And I think more and more it's
(26:10):
what we lack and it's what we seek. The storytelling
voice is another way of calibrating time. It's such a
tiny fragment of our existence as a species that we
calibrate time with a clock mechanical digital that's so recent.
It was always calibration by means of planet tree distance.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
And when is the right time. When Richard was doing
Lloyd's they wanted to put a clock on the outside
of the building. How we went to Gane Tangley and said,
would you possibly design a clock. It was a real
whole long story, which is you had to call them
at a certain time of day, and somehow I was
very involved in this, and so I made the call
and you had to tell him right away what you wanted.
And so I said, mister Tangly, you know, this is
(26:50):
Richard Roger's wife, and we'd like to put a clock
on the outside of Lloyd's. Anyway, that's fantastic. I love
Richard Rogers's work, I love Lloyd's, I love insurance, I
love clock. This is a brilliant idea. And he thought
about it. We talked about it, and then he said,
there's there's just one thing that if I design a
clock for you, there's one condition. And I said what
would that be? And he said, the clock must not
(27:12):
tell the correct time. Wonderful, and you know, and they have.
Of course Lloyd's went next. You know, they weren't totally
but the idea that you could have a clock that
you knew as a you know, as a ritual, as
a consistent which which would not be correct. It is okay,
I'll meet you under the Lloyd's clock, but I don't
know what time that will be.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
I think so I think these these other ways of
calibrating time that are not digital. And I think one
of the things I started doing. I was traveling a
lot too much for a while, and to sort of
earth myself, I would every morning when I would wake up,
I wouldn't quite know where I was. Straight away, I
didn't know, and I would just observe the light coming
(27:54):
through the gap in the two curtains, and for a
while I just say, Okay, I don't know anything else.
I just know that line of light. And I started
photographing them, and I've been doing it for about twenty years,
and I now I'm in a state where in the morning,
even if I wake up at home, I don't have curtains.
I have blinds. So what you see are these two.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Squares have light.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Two yeah, beautiful squares of light. And actually the door
doesn't quite shut probably, so I often get a line
of light through the door and I just sit with those.
I set my alarm twenty minutes before I have to
get up, which is what time normally I get up
around seven point thirty. But I try to just have
that moment with the lines of light, like a sort
of you know, the room is a sun dial.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
The River Cafe is excited to announce the return of
our Italian Christmas Gift Boxes, our alternative to the traditional
have the The gift boxes bring you all of our
favorites from the River Cafe, kitchen, vineyards and the designers
from all over Italy. They're available to pre order now
on Shop the River Cafe do co UK. Tell me
(29:12):
about the most recent or most interesting set you've done,
that you've worked out. Do we call them sets? Do
you still call themselves?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Well, you might call them a stage sculpture. I mean
I think historically set design hierarchically, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Tell me about set design, well.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
It sometimes has been perhaps regarded as something decorative or something.
So the only reason I am a little bit particular
about the words I used to describe it is it
just helps people to recognize that objects can be protagonists,
that environments can speak, that places speak, that you know,
a cup if it's picked up in this particular way
(29:46):
under a particular like can you know, be vocal about
stuff in the way that mountains can and rock scan
and stream scan, you know, and animals can. That's why
I use stage sculptures a bit just to kind of
provoke a little bit, but a recent one. There's one
out on at the moment actually at the Gilgod Theater
for The Crucible, a.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Book that we all if you're American and you grew
up in high school in America, we all with the Crucible.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Tell me about the Crucible and this up well, when
you enter the space. It was at the Olivier Theater
at the National and now it's at the Gilgud Theater.
When you enter the space, it already confronts you because
it is a living box of water pouring, and in
the Gildgod particularly, it's somewhat unnerving because the gil Good
is a beautiful ornate iced cake of a proscenium Edwardian theater.
(30:40):
So it makes you anxious straight away to see this
water pouring like is there a giant leak? That it's
pretty powerful, and it already helps heighten the atmosphere. You know,
there's always that terrible moment when you go in a
theater and you've bought your popcorn or whatever. You sit down,
the seats are uncomfortable. You're with a friend. You're not
sure that they're going to like it. They might find
(31:00):
it boring, because theater can be crap, you know, and
crack theater is some of the crappiest thing you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Because it's hard to do well.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
So if you sit down and you've got all those anxieties,
will it be good? Will it be bad? Will I
be bored? If already there's a gesture that's confident, that
already says I'm going to look after you, I'll keep
You're safe, You're safe with me, then it's a bit
like a restaurant. You walk in and the colors are
being chosen, people already relax, And I think what happens
(31:28):
is people become already tuned in a little bit to
the vibration of the gesture.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Have the sets usually lit then before you when you
sit down, you can see what it's going to be.
Is it dark, going to light?
Speaker 2 (31:40):
And well, it varies, but I'm trying to, I guess,
increase the porosity between the feeling of walking into the
Turbine Hall or the Serpentine and the feeling of walking
into the Gilgod Theater. And I think if you walk
in there's already a sculpture there, you engage in a
different way, and then of course the music begins, and
(32:01):
in this case, it's Caroline Shaw has done this extraordinary
work with an extraordinary musical director as well. And these
voices begin and they are cost you and you don't
have time to worry anymore. You're grabbed.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Do you work with a director from the very first,
when he starts or she starts thinking about how the
play is going to be directed? Because I do that
with a book. We don't write the recipes and then
talk to the photographer and the graphic designer. We all
sit around the table and think, what is every page
going to be? How are we going to photograph this
(32:36):
before we even cook it, or how are we going
to make the page make you want to cook a
recipe and make it clear. So it all starts with that.
And is that the way it is with you?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
With Lindsay Turner, she's the director of the Crucible, and
she and I have worked together now for quite a
long time, for ten years. Actually, I spend quite a
lot of time on a farm in Sussex and she
came down there oka tell me that I haven't I
only just got I haven't done much with it yet.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
What do you want to do? This is a diversion
from the Crucible.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
But well, my dream would be that the people in
my studio who are on computers a lot of the time,
I would really like it that on a Friday or
maybe once a month or what often we can do it,
they would come to the farm and put their hands
in the earth. And it's just a visual symmetry as well.
If these hands are on computer keys all the time
(33:30):
and these imaginations are everywhere, but the nature of our practices,
they're making models, but a lot of the time they're
on computers, and I think it be beautiful for them
to be hands in earth, you know, helping to grow
the food that we then eat. That would be the dream. Yeah,
that's the dream. So that's what we're great.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
It takes time. We went to the farm with So I.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Went to the farm with Lindsay and we sat and
we read the Crucible. We just read the whole thing aloud.
And that's what we always do, is we read it
so that play exists between us. We just share the parts,
so that before we start, even before talking about.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Was it her idea to put it on? Was it her?
She brought it to the nation.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
She had the vision to do it, and she had
a really clear vision for how she wanted to do it.
But even after that first reading, we started to say,
what if. What if the first scene was just this
group of girls sitting at the back of the congregation muttering,
and then one of them gets slapped and we just
see them from the back. So we sort of conjured
the first scene and that led to the environment and
(34:33):
the sculpture around it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Would you direct yourself? Would you say I can do both?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah? I sometimes do, especially with the music, and sometimes
but I really like the collaboration with the director. I
direct the materials and the you know how the life
video and the materials might coalesce, and she directs the
performers and the cast, and it's a lot of directing
of different material and human things.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Do you go where do your players aren't? Do you
go often to see it? And how this said once?
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, I'm normally onto, I'm normally onto the next thing,
but I love to go back. Yeah, you know, especially
towards the end, towards the final night.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
What was it like working with Beyonce then from the
Crucible to Beyonce or was a Beyonce to the Crucible?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Well, I've been working with her for a long time
because we started in twenty fifteen. Oh yeah, that's a
very big team, lots of extraordinary collaborators over time all
over the world and a massive production and also with
able test Fay the weekend so his stadium show was
also happy at the same time, so there was one
(35:37):
night where you could go and see Beyonce the weekend
or another place near England, which is really good.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To see that on Monday, Yeah, way to see that.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I tell you what's fun about that is it's a
really divided audience. It's an audience who loved theater but
might not always be so interested in football. Yeah, it's
an audience who really might not normally set for in
a theater but love football, like my son who doesn't
like theater but likes football. So Ludo will come for that.
And at the beginning there's a little shiftiness like am
(36:09):
I going to hate this? How's it going to be?
And by the end, yeah, everyone is crying and singing
Sweet Caroline together and it's a bit like we've been
talking a little bit about national assemblies and how they
might form a new kind of form of governance and
new ways to participate in democracy, and actually at the
end of that it gives you hope that actually, given
(36:32):
the right stimulus and the right materials and environment, people
can find common ground.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
In the pandemic. When we close the River caf If
you don't ask me what's important in the city, I
would have said, you're a theater of concerts, parks, playgrounds, hospitals.
You know, put restaurants way down. But you realize it
going to see what you're just describing, or to come
perhaps to a restaurant and see people you might not
(37:01):
have seen for years that you pump into or that
you're again the thing of being taken care of, that
you can walk in and feel that you know it's
going to be okay. You might have had an argument
or been stuck in traffic, or lost your job, or
getting divorced or getting married, or you know, happy things
are saved up for months to come, but that somehow
(37:21):
when what you want, and I think what I want
both of us, is to have somebody walk through the
door and feel it's going to be okay and leave
feeling better than when they arrived.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I think so, and I think it comes back to
ritual and the passing of time, because if you've been
working intensely, and you walk into a restaurant and you
know that there's going to be a new rhythm to
the rest of that day. First, it's going to be
the ritual, the welcome, the formalities, the choosing the glass
of whatever you're going to drink, the course one, the
(37:53):
course too. This is a clock in itself, the same
when you go to the theater. And actually, now after
having become temporarily extinct, all of my practice was temporarily extinct.
Me and Jack, we both have devoted our lives to
mass gatherings. Yeah, and suddenly mass gatherings were weapons of
mass destruction?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Did you do?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Panicked? Talked a lot on zoom, became a radio station.
Would have been better to shut up and go off
and do a sabbatical, but didn't.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
But we didn't know. I spent every day.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Jack looked at me, he said, as you're like a
mad sort of ringleader doing zooms. He said, just leave
your people alone. They're happy to have some time off.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
But somehow the contact at some point, wasn't it what
I felt? Well, how we feel now?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Like the other day going to the weekend's concert where
it's eighty no screens, eighty thousand people singing together, one
five h eight man holding eighty thousand people in a stadium.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
We look, we're pinching.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Ourselves, just thinking a few years ago this felt like
it would never happen again. And for me, it's so vital,
one of the most important things we do, I think,
as humans being together.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, well, let's talk about this book. Yeah, let's definitely
talk about this book. I want you to describe this
people who are listening about what we have at the
table between you and myself.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
So what's sitting in between me and Ruthie right now
is a book. It's a small twenty two centimeter square
by about I'm going to say about eight centimeters thick,
so it's a chunky object, and it's got a hole
cut out of the front. And then in the following
pages are more offset holes, and around the holes are
(39:38):
drawn the names of everyone who's ever participated in any
of the collaborative works that I've made over time. Then,
as you unfold its thousand pages, there are seven hundred
images mainly of a sort of parallel series of works
that I've been making for thirty years, small paper sculptures, paintings, drawings,
(40:01):
and then Finally, by the end there's fifty thousand words
in it as well of text of commentary, and then
by the end there are pictures of most of about
one hundred and twenty projects. So it's like doing a
big end of year tax return.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
How long did it take you to.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I started it seven years ago, and then my first
deadline was four years ago, so I've been missing deadlines.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Really have four extra extra years of work.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
This is a very good way of putting it. I
had you stop four years ago, the book might have
stopped a lot of beautiful work.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
This is true.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
That's a bit. It's available in your local bookstore. It
is all good bookstores are online, yeah, and Amazon.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
It's sitting number one, but number one best in artist monographs, and.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
It's published by terms in Hudson. And it's a beautiful,
beautiful object, beautiful book, and it's showing beautiful work. So yeah,
to the next one. If we go back, if we
like ritual, tradition and consistency. If you think about food,
it's a question that I always ask at the end
of what has today been a wonderful conversation. Food is
(41:08):
we have when we're hungry, when we're tired. When, as
you say, you need protein, when you need energy, when
you want to feed your children or be fed. It's
also comfort. What would be a food you might go
to for comfort?
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It is my cheese and tomatoes on top. It is.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
It is. It's mainly tomatoes and.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Red peppers and with a bit of cheese on top,
and you know, some really good outive oil, some salt
and pepper. Make two slices of it, just bake it, yeah,
and then maybe a little glass of wine.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Would that if we're going to the wine and the
cheese and tomatoes, that sounds like a very very comforting meal.
Thank you for today, Thank you for my friend think.
Thank you. If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for
would you please make sure to rate and review the
(41:58):
podcast on the iHeart Rate app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Ruthie's Table four
is produced by Atomai Studios for iHeartRadio. It is hosted
by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by williem Lensky. Our executive
producers are Zad Rodgers and Fay Stewart. Our production manager
(42:21):
is Caitlin Paramore.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe,
Hmm, are we okay for noise? By the way, it's
Friday night.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's Friday, Friday night, It's Friday night. We should do
something that was so fine the night?
Speaker 1 (00:12):
It wasn't that all right? I know? Just to sing?
What did we? We?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Sang?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Still my escape going in June of this year. I'm
completely unsure about what to do with Damien Hirst's beautiful
(00:41):
studio space next to the River Cafe, which he was
giving to us for the memorial for Richard Rogers. My husband,
a friend, Jonah Freud, introduced me to s Devlin by text.
A few hours later, I found myself talking to her
while she put her child to bed at midnight. S
the design of the set for Beyond his concert, the
West End production of the Crucible, the fashion show for Youth.
(01:04):
Saint Laurent had recently finished her radical book in Atlas
of s Stevlin. At the end of the conversation, she said,
I'll tell you what, Ruthie, I'm going to Lisbon tomorrow morning.
Why don't I stop over on the way to the
airport is eight o'clock oka, of course, s I said,
already exhausted. She arrived at day on the dot we've
had a look at the space. She told me what
(01:25):
to do and got straight into a taxi to make
the flight. This was s spontaneous, generous, positive, creative, funny
and very smart. As I write this, S is in
the restaurant talking to Charles pull and our manager about
what makes the River Cafe a set a place that
is active and calm, dark and light, noisy and quiet
(01:46):
at different times of the day. When it comes back
from all this, we'll talk about food, theater, space, books,
family and cooking, and most of all, we will talk
about friendship, and we will talk about love.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Thank you, Yes it's beautiful. Don't change a word.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
So you know the drills. And we asked you to
choose from all the recipes of all the books from
the last twelve cookbooks. So I'd like ask you why
you chose this recipe for kanelini bean soup.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
But this is from the first book. And of course
my first encounter when the River Cafe first was open,
when I was first able to come, which took a
while to get my table, and then when the book
came out and we were fans, so I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
And well back then it.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Was probably me in France read before I met my
husband Jack. But my husband Jack is an extraordinary cook.
He makes this canelini bean soup and he makes it
very specifically with a piece of toast in the bottom.
And he did teach me how to make it. So
I have made it okay, but more often I have
eaten it and that it didn't make it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I The recipe canellini bean soup. Serve six two hundred
and fifty grams cooked cannellini beans, a handful of fresh
sage leaves, two to three garlic cloves, peeled and chopped,
three tablespoons of olive oil, a bunch of fresh flat
(03:23):
leaf parsley chopped extra virgin olive oil in a large saucepan.
Cook the garlic in the olive oil until soft but
not brown. Add the parsley, then add beans and stir.
Put three quarters of the bean mixture into a food
processor with some reserved cooking liquid. Pulse briefly. You do
not want to pure. Add more of the cooking liquid
(03:46):
if necessary, but the soup should be thick. Return to
the saucepan and season. Reheat if too thick, add more
cooking liquid. Serve with generous amount of extra virgin olive oil.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
And perhaps some toast.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And I would if I were Jack, I would be
toasting something in the bottom.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
So you have that gorgeous toast and beans and oil.
So we love threems three ingredients, isn't it? You know, simplicity,
which I guess is perhaps the way you work it is.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
And also I don't eat meat, so and I, as
you mentioned, I use quite a lot of energy, so
I have to be quite careful to make sure I
get a lot of protein without eating meat. And the
beans are amazing for that as well.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
So, going back to the beginning, tell me about growing
up in the Devlin household. Where were you born?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I was born in Kingston Hospital in Kingston upon Thames,
not too far from here, proper suburbia, proper suburbia in
the western suburbs of London. And then my parents went
on a romantic weekend break to Rye in East Sussex,
and they bought a house on a whim on a
cobbled street called Mermaid Street which used to descend into
(04:57):
the sea. And the house had been lived in by
Conrad Aiken the poet and his daughter Joan Akin, the author.
So in my mind, the house spoke. There was a
model city, model town of Rye next to the house,
and we used to visit it every weekend because my
(05:18):
mother and father were so excited to invite their friends
to see the place they loved, so they would take
them to the model, which was a sone Lumier and
it told stories. So each house told a story, including
my house. So I was only six years old, so
in my head something made me think that objects could speak,
(05:39):
houses could speak the way that I think bean speak
and food speaks. So that was me growing up. And
my mother was a teacher.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
What did she do.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
She taught special needs children, dyslexic children. At that time,
she had taught lots of things, but she was teaching
dyslexic kids. And my dad was a journalist specializing in education.
They were both fascinated with education, actually, But my mom
prepared all the food. My dad could make scrambled eggs
on toast, that was really it. I'm worried that I
might be like my father was slightly known for only
(06:12):
cooking one thing. Okay, because I don't get very much.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
That's fine, what is your one thing?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, I do make cheese and tomatoes, on toast quite well,
if it's good toast, and I sometimes put red pepper.
I'm trying to use the vegan cheese.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Are you vegan and vegetarian?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now I'm vegetarian, but I'm just trying to be as
smart as possible with the ingredients. But yeah, my mum
was in the kitchen. She was trying to manage everything.
There were four kids, four and she taught all day
and then he came home and cooked. Yeah, would you
sit down, all of you to do Yeah, every year.
But it was quite a lot of you know, back
then in the eighties and late seventies, quite a lot
of potato waffles, the freezer, whatever she had time for.
(06:54):
Then she got a slow cooker and she realized that
before she went to work, she could put all the
ingredients big meaty stews she could put.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
She would do a.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
White one or a brown one, and she put all
the ingredients of the chicken or whatever it was in there.
In the morning, she'd go out do her whole day teaching,
and then we would come home from school. The idea
was that the big stew would be there for us
to eat, and that worked well, no, because we liked
the potato waffles, so we would just go to the
freezer and get poor mam so she gave up after
(07:25):
that a bit.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
So your father would come back. Would he work in London?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, we only saw him at the weekend because he
would stay up in London to get to Rye at
the time, it's quite a track, so he would come
back at the weekends. So my mum was really holding
the four and we we all did a lot of things.
There was music lessons orchestra. We had a little yellow
citron Diane that we had to park facing downhill on
(07:51):
Mermaid Street, otherwise it wouldn't start if it was facing
uphill because then if it if it didn't start, you.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Could just roll it down.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
She would put hot water bottles on it in the
winter to stop the points freezing. She had a little
plastic like a bonnet that you put on to stop
your hair getting wet. In the shower. She put one
of those over the whole car, a big bonnet to
stop it getting wet. But we would go to the
beach after school in the summer every day, to camber
Sands or to Winchelsea and we would My food memory
(08:20):
of that time I was sitting usually crappy weather, in
the wind and unwrapping foil crusty little pastries, and then
the sand, the grit of the sand would get in them,
and she would make these little pastry chicken pies. So
I remember the chicken in the sand. They were kind
of tasty with a bit of sand in them.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So you grew up in this house with four children,
where are you in the list of number two? Number two?
And the mother who worked, a father who was absent,
and you had a meal every night that you would
sit around the table and would you all talk about
what you've done during the day, just eat and then
do the homework.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Was noisy, very noisy, and kind of My brothers went
to boarding school for a while. I think it was
all too much, probably for my mum to manage four
kids at once, so they went off for a bit
and they would come back in the holidays and it
was very, very noisy, and there were friends over, and yeah,
it was food and noise and talking.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And at lunch, would you take your lunch to school?
Did you get lunch school food?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
School food? Yes? Oh yes, oh yes. School food was
horrible rice puddings that were all skinny, and you had
to eat it all. It was a local school called
Frieda kardam in Rye Primary School, and then we moved
to Kent to go to a school called Cranbrook School,
which was a grammar school. They had a little cafeteria
(09:43):
that you would choose your food, but we just did
eat the potato waffles.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And came back to the I'm afraid it's such a
shame because I've never seen a potato. I guess I
have to go through the British education system had a potato.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yes, I mean, in fairness to my mum, the the
fact that you know, we were annoying children who liked
processed food was not her fault. She's a fantastic cook.
She makes great big themed I mean, she would make
ridiculously crazy birthday cakes, theatrical, perhaps extraordinarily the I mean.
My mum's a great artist, as is my dad. They
didn't pursue art as her career, but all of our
(10:18):
birthdays were always it would be a themed mermaid cake
with mermaid biscuits. I am I'm pretty terrible because I
do when I eat a meal, and I've been served
the most beautiful meals in my life by my husband
and others, But I tend to eat the conversation. Yeah,
the food tastes of the thought. That's fine, that's a story.
(10:39):
That's a story of food. And I think food can
be a story. And I think you know, what you
eat is so much obviously more than what's going in
your mouth. And the lighting. I am obsessed with what
the light is. I can't if I walk into a restaurant,
the light is where I will probably go up to
the person's say, can I just dim this switch here?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
So what is the lighting that you like? Low? Low?
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Or outside and being in the like just now, we
were sitting outside your beautiful piazza. So either natural light
or the light of the fire. Yeah, by the fire,
the food by a fire.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I'm Charles Pullan, executive director of the River Cafe, and
we are sitting on the table one oh six on
the terrace outside on a Friday afternoon, and I'm about
to talk with es Devlyn. Very exciting. We want to
get her take on the feel and the energy and
the design of the River Cafe. So rather than one
of her sets that we do all over the world,
(11:35):
be rather interesting just for us to hear what your
take is on the space that we use. As people
arrived through the front door, their first view as they
look left down the length of the very long dining
room is that it's the big pink word oven than
the fire in there flickering away, which has a wonderful
purpose of shrinking the room in a way and making
it feel cozy and make it feel much more intimate
(11:57):
despite the facts it is a very long, large dining room.
It's such a such a sort of hackneyed old reference,
the fact that there is so much in common with
the theater and the restaurant world. But it's a truism
because there are so many parallels with how you gear up,
you rehearse your audition, but then there's the energy that
just before service, just before the curtains up, and then
(12:19):
you all jump into your roles. And so we've always
talked about the staff and the food and all that
side of things. But from your point of view, it
might be interesting to hear how the kind of design
of the dining room itself comes into play.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
I think the comparison between the performative aspects of the
delivery of food and the physical aspects of being backstage
and front stage are clear. I don't find them hackneyed.
I think they're fascinating. When I was here last time,
it was an evening. The weather was a bit like this,
maybe not so sunny, but we all gathered in bright
(12:54):
clothes in honor of Richard's love of bright colors, all
around the banks of this piazza, and.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Of course the river. It's called the River car favor reason.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We are adjacent to this great planetary force that runs
through our city. So for me, those fundamental forces of
the fire in the bright crimson furnace, and the river
that's here, this green piazza of grass that's outside, the
vivid color of the doors everywhere in the toilets, this
(13:25):
beautiful red orange fluorescent color. Right, So, I think all
of those energies are felt even when you're inside. We're
sitting outside now, but I believe they're felt inside as well.
And of course the color that the idea that when
you eat, you're not just eating food, you're eating color.
You're eating light because the way that light reverberates off
(13:46):
objects to create color. You're eating what you smell, You're
eating the conversation that you might be having with someone.
That's what you're eating. That's what you're nourished by. So
much more than molecules that you need is fuel, right,
and that's this place has always celebrated that. And of
course what's beautiful about it in my understanding of the
etymology of this restaurant and why it's so duly loved,
(14:10):
is because it began as a place of work, didn't
It began as a canteen to feed those who were
working together to make buildings.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
The paper tape cloth here is absolutely was here so
that Richard could get out its pens and squibble on
them and design the next compute, whatever it might have been.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
And I think that's why it feels so rooted in
this spot. It's here for more reasons than one might think,
even on the surface. Of course, now it's become this
incredibly sought after place to have some of the finest food,
with the finest produce, with some of the most successful
and accessible and readable and beautiful cookbits that have ever
been made. But it started because a team at lunch
(14:52):
time needed to eat in a place where there aren't
many restaurants. And it started from we always talk about
in any kind of work of art, what was the
need it need to be made, and this needed to
be made, like Ruthie and Richard needed to be together,
like you know, their need of each other sort of
resonated through all their friends and the vast kind of
circle of people they've gathered around them, which I really
(15:14):
witnessed when I was here on that the way.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I understand that you cook for the people that you
work with as any yeah every day.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah so I don't cook, but I have a cook
who makes meals every day. And we started that probably
about seven years ago when we moved to a studio
that didn't really have an easy way for people to eat.
But also it was part of balancing our carbon footprint
and it seemed much more sensible. If I have around
eight to ten people in the studio every day, we
(15:49):
make them vegetarian food. There's no food waste, there's no packaging,
no one's running around getting bits of things in plastic
boxes or anything. But it was what's something I could do.
You know, we still fly. I can diminish it, but
I can't completely get rid of that from my practice
at the moment. But what I can do is serve
everyone a really nice vegetarian all eat together. Yeah, we
will stop work. We go around the table in my house,
(16:11):
there's a garden there. We all sit down and we eat.
We have a wonderful lady called Chia who's cooking for
us at the moment. We had Antonio until she had
to leave. But that's really important for me that we sit,
we talk to each other, we eat great food.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I think that again, how you combine work food. You
know that people who need to go out and go
for a walk to stop the people the idea of
the business lunch where you go to a restaurant and
you discuss work, which was an anathemat It rends a
piano Richard's partner. He thought, I remember when they were
doing the Pompa. It was like either you ate or
(16:45):
you worked. You never would, you know, combine the two,
you know, the idea of enjoying a meal while you
talked about work, you continue the work of the meal or.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Usually not normally, we just talk about stuff we want
to talk about. It's not working over lunch. And everyone
goes out for a walk after lunch because we're near
Dulwich Park, so people go out, they wander off, they
get a coffee, they have all break but normally know
the conversation. Either we're silent. Sometimes sometimes we just need
a break and we will sit there. We're happy in
each other's company, just eating. We're very happy to say nothing.
(17:17):
Or we just chit chat about any old thing that's
nothing to do with work. Or we invite people to lunch.
A lot of the time there are a lot of
kids who want to see the studio who might not
otherwise experience what a studio is like. So we're busy,
but we're always stopping for lunch. So we say come
to lunch, so they come. They get the vibe. Everyone's
(17:39):
not panicking because they're not meant to be working. It's
a time for a break.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
And you're quite solitary.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I love being on my own. I love reading. I
always draw when I read. I write when I read,
I draw, I have to underline. I can't read without
a pen in my hand. I love it on my own,
but I don't spend very much time on my own
because I have two children out and I have eight
people in my studio minimum, so I'm rarely on my own,
so I really cherish it when I am.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Because we were talking the other day about artists and alcohol,
and drinking and going out and being together in the
evening because so many artists are alone during the day
that then when it's sort of over, you want to
kind of go out to be out. Did you have
that period in your life before you had children you
were working and then partying.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, I mean I think the time when I moved
to London, when I was at early teens. You know,
it was magical. My boyfriend at the time was.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sixteen is young.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I was young.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Well your parents were fine with that.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
And not really no. Yeah, I was kind of determined
in what I wanted to do, and it was music.
My boyfriend at the time was a record producer and
a sound engineer, so I was with a lot of
musicians and I spent a lot of time in recording studios,
just observing how music is made, how tracks are recorded,
how music is edited. That was a really formative time
(19:01):
to get under the skin of recording in music. And
then when I was in Bristol, that was probably my
most party time. That was my hallucinogenic moment.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Tell me about then when you left home.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I was about sixteen and I fell in love with
a man who was twenty four. I did finish school.
But I spent a lot of time in London.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Has that a domestic situation? Did you live in a
house and have to cook and shop for yourself?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
But we do. You know, we had hardly ever been
to a restaurant when we didn't go to restaurants ever,
we didn't have the money for kids in a restaurant,
and restaurants in England at the time, it wasn't the
same thing that we're talking about. Well, as I was
growing up in the seventies and eighties, we never went
to a I can remember going to a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Once special occasion, or I think it.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Was because the car broke down and we went and
it had red walls and the parmesan was off. That's
all I remember about a restaurant. So the first time
I really remember going to restaurants was when I was
sixteen and I met my boyfriend and he would take
me out in London to restaurants and we went to
Mister Wing and we ate duck pancakes. It's an Earl's
Court and Julie's restaurant and those were the rest and
(20:10):
I was like, wow, this is crazy.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, so you ate in restaurants and maybe cooked for
yourself or yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Then I did do a bit of cooking, and I
would have been at university when I got your book.
I didn't have any furniture. I had a wooden palette
on the floor and I put cushions around it. And
I would try and make the River Cafe recipes. That
was when I first got the blue book.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And then you cooked your way through university? Did you
stay there? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, and I did cook. Then I would eat veggie
burgers in the cafe. Vegetarian at that I wasn't. No,
I just like the veggie burgers. I wasn't vegetarian. Then
I would make chicken. I would do tie dinners, and
I would get the galangle and lime and coconut milk
and make chicken coconut milk soup. I would do that.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So when you left Bristol, and what did you do?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
When I left Bristol, I had been writing, as you do.
I was doing an English literature degree, so I was
reading and writing, reading, reading, writing for three years. But
I also wanted to paint, so I painted a lot.
I painted my whole house, which was rented.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Murals on the walls.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah wow. And it was a rented apartment, and it
had a shag pile carpet that I ripped off. It
was disgusting, had carpet all over the side of the bath.
So I took all the carpets away and painted on
the floor great big murals and painted a lot of
I made a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Did your landlord ever stop by to visit?
Speaker 2 (21:28):
No?
Speaker 1 (21:28):
In trouble.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
When I left, I had to put it all. I
had to get a new shag pile carpet, put it back.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
So underneath some person's apartment, you should go back there
and lift up the carpet. Discovery and Michelangelo under under canvas,
you know.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Have a look in number one three five cotton brow
one three nine. I can't remember, but so I wanted
to make art there. And I went to Saint Martin's
and I did the foundation course.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
After the university, I did it all back front. It's
not bad to have one education and then have another.
I wasn't ready to go to art school.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Although I'd always made art at school, I wasn't ready
to go to art school, not least because if you
went to art school you had to stay living at home. Yeah,
And I wanted to move. I wanted to live in Bristol,
so yeah, I went to Saint Martin's and had the
most you know, rich year of just I was. I
was a mature student by then. Everyone else was eighteen.
(22:26):
I was twenty one and quite old. So I did
everything there. You really got into photography, printmaking, sculpture, made
a lot of books. I sowed a book. I decided
a book had to be made completely stitched. And then
people kept saying to me, oh, you really should check
out this theater design course.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
A'd sat minds There was a.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Specific one called Motley Theater Design Course, which was run
by a ninety three year old lady called Percy Harris,
who's a bit of a legend in the world of
stage design. And I said, I don't really care about theater.
It's quite boring. I never sit through and was asleep,
or it's a music it's kind of embarrassing. Want to
do theater? And they said, no, no, just go and
check out this course. And I walked in and it
(23:06):
was this red room, smell of pot noodle. Definitely saw
a mouse.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And where was it. It was in the.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Scene dock of the theater Royal Drury Lane at the time,
there was Miss Saigon. So every night you would hear
the helicopter coming down, and it was just ten students,
pretty much feral, slightly smelly. They hadn't left that room
for a year.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
They were just in and they were making. They had
little model theaters, they were listening to opera. There was
references and photographs and painting stuck all over the wall.
And I felt, I thought, this is my tribe. I'm
happy and I've never really left that room. In a way.
Whatever I'm making, it's in a room. My room now
is kind of like that. It's covered in stuff, Piles
(23:51):
and piles of books, tons of little drawings and pictures
all over the wall, lots of little sculptures, quite magical,
lots of miniatures.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
You have a beautiful voice. Did you sing? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I did try and say occasion, I was so bad.
Funnily enough, I've learned to use my voice a bit now.
When I make sculptures, I speak in them. But about
tell me more about that?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Well, there's a work that's on in Miami at the
moment called Forest of Us and it starts as a
small film with me talking. Really just noticing the similarity
between the shape of human lungs and the shape of trees,
and just observing that. Then the film comes apart and
you walk into a sculpture that reverberates that observation. But
(24:38):
when I first made these types of works in twenty sixteen,
I would never have used my voice.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Like a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
If I heard my voice on an answering machine back
in the day when we had answers, I've been back.
Oh God, I don't sound like that. That's weird. I
sound you know, that's terrible that I got used to
it when I used to read my children's stories when
I put them to sleep, and I got used to
the different quality of sound. If I had one of
their heads on my chest, my voice sounded different, and
(25:07):
I got used to that, and I kind of became
comfortable with my own voice around.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Then, stories and boys and theater and designing the story
of your growing up, decorating the cakes to going to
Bristol and cooking Thai food and putting murals under carpets.
It's all about discovery and trying to find the story
with the theme underneath it. And then food is the same.
You have the ingredients. You try and think how you
(25:35):
can respect the ingredient, the simplicity of the ingredient, if
you're a vegetarian, if you're vegan, if you're trying to
do something with or without. It always is that kind
of restraint which then leads to the richness, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I think so when I think everything that you're just
describing there is also about seeking a very basic human
need for being participant in ritual. Yeah, and we were
talking actually a little earlier about river, caffe and ritual.
And you've got all the ingredients here for ritual. You
have the river, you have the fire, you have that
piazza of grass, And I think more and more it's
(26:10):
what we lack and it's what we seek. The storytelling
voice is another way of calibrating time. It's such a
tiny fragment of our existence as a species that we
calibrate time with a clock mechanical digital that's so recent.
It was always calibration by means of planet tree distance.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
And when is the right time. When Richard was doing
Lloyd's they wanted to put a clock on the outside
of the building. How we went to Gane Tangley and said,
would you possibly design a clock. It was a real
whole long story, which is you had to call them
at a certain time of day, and somehow I was
very involved in this, and so I made the call
and you had to tell him right away what you wanted.
And so I said, mister Tangly, you know, this is
(26:50):
Richard Roger's wife, and we'd like to put a clock
on the outside of Lloyd's. Anyway, that's fantastic. I love
Richard Rogers's work, I love Lloyd's, I love insurance, I
love clock. This is a brilliant idea. And he thought
about it. We talked about it, and then he said,
there's there's just one thing that if I design a
clock for you, there's one condition. And I said what
would that be? And he said, the clock must not
(27:12):
tell the correct time. Wonderful, and you know, and they have.
Of course Lloyd's went next. You know, they weren't totally
but the idea that you could have a clock that
you knew as a you know, as a ritual, as
a consistent which which would not be correct. It is okay,
I'll meet you under the Lloyd's clock, but I don't
know what time that will be.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
I think so I think these these other ways of
calibrating time that are not digital. And I think one
of the things I started doing. I was traveling a
lot too much for a while, and to sort of
earth myself, I would every morning when I would wake up,
I wouldn't quite know where I was. Straight away, I
didn't know, and I would just observe the light coming
(27:54):
through the gap in the two curtains, and for a
while I just say, Okay, I don't know anything else.
I just know that line of light. And I started
photographing them, and I've been doing it for about twenty years,
and I now I'm in a state where in the morning,
even if I wake up at home, I don't have curtains.
I have blinds. So what you see are these two.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Squares have light.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Two yeah, beautiful squares of light. And actually the door
doesn't quite shut probably, so I often get a line
of light through the door and I just sit with those.
I set my alarm twenty minutes before I have to
get up, which is what time normally I get up
around seven point thirty. But I try to just have
that moment with the lines of light, like a sort
of you know, the room is a sun dial.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
The River Cafe is excited to announce the return of
our Italian Christmas Gift Boxes, our alternative to the traditional
have the The gift boxes bring you all of our
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on Shop the River Cafe do co UK. Tell me
(29:12):
about the most recent or most interesting set you've done,
that you've worked out. Do we call them sets? Do
you still call themselves?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Well, you might call them a stage sculpture. I mean
I think historically set design hierarchically, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Tell me about set design, well.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
It sometimes has been perhaps regarded as something decorative or something.
So the only reason I am a little bit particular
about the words I used to describe it is it
just helps people to recognize that objects can be protagonists,
that environments can speak, that places speak, that you know,
a cup if it's picked up in this particular way
(29:46):
under a particular like can you know, be vocal about
stuff in the way that mountains can and rock scan
and stream scan, you know, and animals can. That's why
I use stage sculptures a bit just to kind of
provoke a little bit, but a recent one. There's one
out on at the moment actually at the Gilgod Theater
for The Crucible, a.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Book that we all if you're American and you grew
up in high school in America, we all with the Crucible.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Tell me about the Crucible and this up well, when
you enter the space. It was at the Olivier Theater
at the National and now it's at the Gilgud Theater.
When you enter the space, it already confronts you because
it is a living box of water pouring, and in
the Gildgod particularly, it's somewhat unnerving because the gil Good
is a beautiful ornate iced cake of a proscenium Edwardian theater.
(30:40):
So it makes you anxious straight away to see this
water pouring like is there a giant leak? That it's
pretty powerful, and it already helps heighten the atmosphere. You know,
there's always that terrible moment when you go in a
theater and you've bought your popcorn or whatever. You sit down,
the seats are uncomfortable. You're with a friend. You're not
sure that they're going to like it. They might find
(31:00):
it boring, because theater can be crap, you know, and
crack theater is some of the crappiest thing you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Because it's hard to do well.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
So if you sit down and you've got all those anxieties,
will it be good? Will it be bad? Will I
be bored? If already there's a gesture that's confident, that
already says I'm going to look after you, I'll keep
You're safe, You're safe with me, then it's a bit
like a restaurant. You walk in and the colors are
being chosen, people already relax, And I think what happens
(31:28):
is people become already tuned in a little bit to
the vibration of the gesture.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Have the sets usually lit then before you when you
sit down, you can see what it's going to be.
Is it dark, going to light?
Speaker 2 (31:40):
And well, it varies, but I'm trying to, I guess,
increase the porosity between the feeling of walking into the
Turbine Hall or the Serpentine and the feeling of walking
into the Gilgod Theater. And I think if you walk
in there's already a sculpture there, you engage in a
different way, and then of course the music begins, and
(32:01):
in this case, it's Caroline Shaw has done this extraordinary
work with an extraordinary musical director as well. And these
voices begin and they are cost you and you don't
have time to worry anymore. You're grabbed.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Do you work with a director from the very first,
when he starts or she starts thinking about how the
play is going to be directed? Because I do that
with a book. We don't write the recipes and then
talk to the photographer and the graphic designer. We all
sit around the table and think, what is every page
going to be? How are we going to photograph this
(32:36):
before we even cook it, or how are we going
to make the page make you want to cook a
recipe and make it clear. So it all starts with that.
And is that the way it is with you?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
With Lindsay Turner, she's the director of the Crucible, and
she and I have worked together now for quite a
long time, for ten years. Actually, I spend quite a
lot of time on a farm in Sussex and she
came down there oka tell me that I haven't I
only just got I haven't done much with it yet.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
What do you want to do? This is a diversion
from the Crucible.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
But well, my dream would be that the people in
my studio who are on computers a lot of the time,
I would really like it that on a Friday or
maybe once a month or what often we can do it,
they would come to the farm and put their hands
in the earth. And it's just a visual symmetry as well.
If these hands are on computer keys all the time
(33:30):
and these imaginations are everywhere, but the nature of our practices,
they're making models, but a lot of the time they're
on computers, and I think it be beautiful for them
to be hands in earth, you know, helping to grow
the food that we then eat. That would be the dream. Yeah,
that's the dream. So that's what we're great.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
It takes time. We went to the farm with So I.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Went to the farm with Lindsay and we sat and
we read the Crucible. We just read the whole thing aloud.
And that's what we always do, is we read it
so that play exists between us. We just share the parts,
so that before we start, even before talking about.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Was it her idea to put it on? Was it her?
She brought it to the nation.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
She had the vision to do it, and she had
a really clear vision for how she wanted to do it.
But even after that first reading, we started to say,
what if. What if the first scene was just this
group of girls sitting at the back of the congregation muttering,
and then one of them gets slapped and we just
see them from the back. So we sort of conjured
the first scene and that led to the environment and
(34:33):
the sculpture around it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Would you direct yourself? Would you say I can do both?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah? I sometimes do, especially with the music, and sometimes
but I really like the collaboration with the director. I
direct the materials and the you know how the life
video and the materials might coalesce, and she directs the
performers and the cast, and it's a lot of directing
of different material and human things.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Do you go where do your players aren't? Do you
go often to see it? And how this said once?
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, I'm normally onto, I'm normally onto the next thing,
but I love to go back. Yeah, you know, especially
towards the end, towards the final night.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
What was it like working with Beyonce then from the
Crucible to Beyonce or was a Beyonce to the Crucible?
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Well, I've been working with her for a long time
because we started in twenty fifteen. Oh yeah, that's a
very big team, lots of extraordinary collaborators over time all
over the world and a massive production and also with
able test Fay the weekend so his stadium show was
also happy at the same time, so there was one
(35:37):
night where you could go and see Beyonce the weekend
or another place near England, which is really good.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To see that on Monday, Yeah, way to see that.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I tell you what's fun about that is it's a
really divided audience. It's an audience who loved theater but
might not always be so interested in football. Yeah, it's
an audience who really might not normally set for in
a theater but love football, like my son who doesn't
like theater but likes football. So Ludo will come for that.
And at the beginning there's a little shiftiness like am
(36:09):
I going to hate this? How's it going to be?
And by the end, yeah, everyone is crying and singing
Sweet Caroline together and it's a bit like we've been
talking a little bit about national assemblies and how they
might form a new kind of form of governance and
new ways to participate in democracy, and actually at the
end of that it gives you hope that actually, given
(36:32):
the right stimulus and the right materials and environment, people
can find common ground.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
In the pandemic. When we close the River caf If
you don't ask me what's important in the city, I
would have said, you're a theater of concerts, parks, playgrounds, hospitals.
You know, put restaurants way down. But you realize it
going to see what you're just describing, or to come
perhaps to a restaurant and see people you might not
(37:01):
have seen for years that you pump into or that
you're again the thing of being taken care of, that
you can walk in and feel that you know it's
going to be okay. You might have had an argument
or been stuck in traffic, or lost your job, or
getting divorced or getting married, or you know, happy things
are saved up for months to come, but that somehow
(37:21):
when what you want, and I think what I want
both of us, is to have somebody walk through the
door and feel it's going to be okay and leave
feeling better than when they arrived.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I think so, and I think it comes back to
ritual and the passing of time, because if you've been
working intensely, and you walk into a restaurant and you
know that there's going to be a new rhythm to
the rest of that day. First, it's going to be
the ritual, the welcome, the formalities, the choosing the glass
of whatever you're going to drink, the course one, the
(37:53):
course too. This is a clock in itself, the same
when you go to the theater. And actually, now after
having become temporarily extinct, all of my practice was temporarily extinct.
Me and Jack, we both have devoted our lives to
mass gatherings. Yeah, and suddenly mass gatherings were weapons of
mass destruction?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Did you do?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Panicked? Talked a lot on zoom, became a radio station.
Would have been better to shut up and go off
and do a sabbatical, but didn't.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
But we didn't know. I spent every day.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Jack looked at me, he said, as you're like a
mad sort of ringleader doing zooms. He said, just leave
your people alone. They're happy to have some time off.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
But somehow the contact at some point, wasn't it what
I felt? Well, how we feel now?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Like the other day going to the weekend's concert where
it's eighty no screens, eighty thousand people singing together, one
five h eight man holding eighty thousand people in a stadium.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
We look, we're pinching.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Ourselves, just thinking a few years ago this felt like
it would never happen again. And for me, it's so vital,
one of the most important things we do, I think,
as humans being together.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, well, let's talk about this book. Yeah, let's definitely
talk about this book. I want you to describe this
people who are listening about what we have at the
table between you and myself.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
So what's sitting in between me and Ruthie right now
is a book. It's a small twenty two centimeter square
by about I'm going to say about eight centimeters thick,
so it's a chunky object, and it's got a hole
cut out of the front. And then in the following
pages are more offset holes, and around the holes are
(39:38):
drawn the names of everyone who's ever participated in any
of the collaborative works that I've made over time. Then,
as you unfold its thousand pages, there are seven hundred
images mainly of a sort of parallel series of works
that I've been making for thirty years, small paper sculptures, paintings, drawings,
(40:01):
and then Finally, by the end there's fifty thousand words
in it as well of text of commentary, and then
by the end there are pictures of most of about
one hundred and twenty projects. So it's like doing a
big end of year tax return.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
How long did it take you to.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I started it seven years ago, and then my first
deadline was four years ago, so I've been missing deadlines.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Really have four extra extra years of work.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
This is a very good way of putting it. I
had you stop four years ago, the book might have
stopped a lot of beautiful work.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
This is true.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
That's a bit. It's available in your local bookstore. It
is all good bookstores are online, yeah, and Amazon.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
It's sitting number one, but number one best in artist monographs, and.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
It's published by terms in Hudson. And it's a beautiful,
beautiful object, beautiful book, and it's showing beautiful work. So yeah,
to the next one. If we go back, if we
like ritual, tradition and consistency. If you think about food,
it's a question that I always ask at the end
of what has today been a wonderful conversation. Food is
(41:08):
we have when we're hungry, when we're tired. When, as
you say, you need protein, when you need energy, when
you want to feed your children or be fed. It's
also comfort. What would be a food you might go
to for comfort?
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It is my cheese and tomatoes on top. It is.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
It is. It's mainly tomatoes and.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Red peppers and with a bit of cheese on top,
and you know, some really good outive oil, some salt
and pepper. Make two slices of it, just bake it, yeah,
and then maybe a little glass of wine.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Would that if we're going to the wine and the
cheese and tomatoes, that sounds like a very very comforting meal.
Thank you for today, Thank you for my friend think.
Thank you. If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for
would you please make sure to rate and review the
(41:58):
podcast on the iHeart Rate app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Ruthie's Table four
is produced by Atomai Studios for iHeartRadio. It is hosted
by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by williem Lensky. Our executive
producers are Zad Rodgers and Fay Stewart. Our production manager
(42:21):
is Caitlin Paramore.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe,
Host
Ruth Rogers
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