Back in February 2024 I wrote a piece called 7 Artists Exploring Food As A Medium To Follow Now. I had just begun using this Substack properly, and I wanted somewhere to gather the practitioners I kept returning to: the ones working with food as material, as language, as ritual, as a way of holding people together. Artists like Inês Neto dos Santos, Nora Silva, Fluid Table and Rafael Perez Evans opened that door for me, and I wanted to share their practices with my readers at the time.
Two years on, that list feels like the beginning of a much longer conversation. Food has moved further into the gallery, the residency, the design fair and the museum, and a whole field of artists, designers, chefs and studios is pushing at it from different directions at once. What I notice most is how much they share and how conviviality plays a significant role. With the same curiosity about material and process. The same willingness to let a table, a loaf or a jelly carry an argument. And the same interest in generosity, in feeding people, in making an encounter rather than an object.
So this is attempt of Part II. Thirteen names instead of seven, and every one of them here for the same reason: their practices and processes echo one another. My aim with this list is a simple one. To shed more light on the incredible creatives working in this space, whose work deserves a much wider audience, and to pass the light on in the way these practitioners so often do themselves. The previous list changed my own practice. I hope this one changes someone else’s.
1. Giuseppe Burdo, @maisongb Product designer, and the founder and director of Food Art Fair. Giuseppe studied Communication and Design at IUAV University in Venice and has worked across Italy and the UK, moving between design theory, fabrication and computation, with a day job in senior product design alongside it. In 2026 he launched the first edition of Food Art Fair at Ladbroke Hall in West London, and it already reads as one of the most generous things to happen to this corner of the art world: a fair that treats food as a design discipline in its own right, and gives makers, chefs and studios a proper room to show in.
2. Kiki Cheung, @murder.cake Jelly maker and pastry chef, originally from Hong Kong and now based in South East London. Kiki founded Murder Cake in 2020, and her three words for the work say everything: cute, gothic, wobbly. Her sculptural gelatin and cake designs draw on kawaii and ugly styling at once, so a wobbling set jelly can be both charming and a little bit threatening. Working with her on Breakfast in bed... (and other bad habits) earlier this year was one of the most joyful collaborations I have had, and her practice keeps asking the best question available to any maker: what happens if we take play seriously?
3. Andrea Ferrero, @andreaferrerop Born in Lima in 1991 and now living and working in Mexico City. Andrea holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, was part of the SOMA Academic Program, and received the 2025 Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award. Her work looks at how architectures of power shape the way we imagine, understand and move through the world, and she translates that into immersive installations, playful infrastructures and edible banquets, weaving political history together with myth, prophecy and personal memory. Her techniques run from aluminium casting and ironwork all the way to chocolate. She is currently in residence at the Delfina Foundation, and The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last at Copperfield shows what that residency has opened up.
4. Gab Bois, @gabbois Montreal-based artist whose surreal, playful images transform everyday objects, food and the body into something altogether stranger. Her egg bra, a sunny side up confection built for wearing, is the one that travelled furthest, and there are rhubarb purses and rhubarb knits beside it. Fashion, image-making and appetite meet in a practice that has built an audience of more than half a million people by treating the visual world as endlessly malleable. Her work is the reminder that food’s first medium is often the eye.
5. Shared Space Studio, @shared.space.studio Founded by Aleksandra Moczulska, Shared Space Studio is a London-based creative food studio working at the intersection of food, art and design. Their bread wardrobe leads the way, a wardrobe built from bread with baguette ballet slippers to match, and it sits alongside floating focaccia, bedazzled cakes and tables set in the woods. In their own words, the work lands somewhere between dinner and an art installation, which is precisely the territory this list keeps circling.
6. Yasmeen Ayyashi, @yasmeen.ayyashi Narrative designer and chef who leads narrative design and creative direction in her commercial practice while running a culinary one of her own. She works through a fictional entity called The Council for Culinary Curiosities and other narrative affairs, and describes food as an experiential format, held to a narratological lens, where it becomes dramaturg, device, subject, narrator or interface at different moments. Three supper clubs carry it: The Breakup Supper Club, Sard w Sufra, and Dining with the Unseen. Her installation FORMLESS showed in Amman and Beirut, and her latest work was displayed at the V&A.
7. Maayan Sophia Weisstub, @weisstub London-based multidisciplinary artist who uses the body as an artistic material to explore memory, duality and grief. Her works subvert our expectations of anatomy and inanimate objects, fusing the two into surreal hybrids: Oystear, Penis Dentata, The Spice Cabinet, made in conversation with Dalí’s Venus de Milo with Drawers and La Femme Commode, and The Milkmaid, a sculpture in silicone and ceramic where the fruit, abundant and generous, is squeezed until it is depleted. Her work insists on sustenance as much as it insists on loss, and it holds love, food, connection to the earth and beauty in the same frame.
8. Lucy Ellerton, @lucyellerton Born in 1993 and based in London, Lucy works across sculpture, casting, printmaking and installation, using jesmonite, metal and silicone to make conceptually layered forms that borrow from everyday objects and consumer products. She turns disposable things into strange memorials: loo roll cast in jesmonite, scampi fries carved from wood, a dog toy remembered in bronze. Her works sit between parody and reverence, and the food titles run right through the set, from Scampi Fries (for Katie) and Meatballs to Milk and Don’t Play With Your Food I, which is currently showing in PINPOINT at the Sarabande Foundation, where she is a resident. MA in Sculpture at the RCA with a Distinction, BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
9. Mark Purves, @mdapurves Born in 1982 in Edinburgh and based in Livingston, Mark reimagines the everyday objects we eat, wear and use, and he does it in a way that keeps testing what a painting is. He embeds painted facsimiles of food items into the very surface that represents them, so the canvas becomes a hybrid, image and object at once, sometimes carved in styrofoam and oil, sometimes with marble planets alongside. Sausage and Egg, Cosmic Smile, All Together Now and Hold On show the range, and he describes himself, disarmingly, as really a landscape painter. Once you notice that the landscape is the tabletop, it makes complete sense.
10. Olivia Strange, @olivia_strange_ Multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, painting, moving image and poetry, exploring queer female subjectivity through a layered, narrative practice. She is a practising witch, and that sits at the centre of the work rather than at its edges, running through projects like The Real Housewives of Apotropacia and her room in the Saatchi Gallery’s Witchcraft presentation. Her materials and titles run on appetite, taste and the body, from engraved aluminium plates to the line every tear on every face tastes the same, and she makes an empowering, mischievous image of feminine power that stays with you.
11. Bompas & Parr, @bompasandparr Founded in 2007 by Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, and still the reference point for anyone wondering how far food can travel as a design material. London and Hong Kong based and operating globally, the studio brings together artists, architects, chefs, designers, strategists and technologists, and began as jellymongers using jelly as a vehicle for researching how the senses speak to one another. From there came flavour-led experiences built for museums, cities and governments, all under a simple line about cultivating culture. Twenty years on, they remain the studio everyone else in this field is quietly measured against, and rightly so.
12. Olivia Sterling, @oliviaster London based painter whose closely cropped, vividly coloured canvases teem with arms, legs and half-eaten food. She paints British food, bowls of double cream, mousse, milk and chocolate, and the food often matches the skin colour of the figures, so appetite, race and class arrive in the same mouthful. Race runs underneath all of it. She sets slapstick comedy and dark humour against racist tropes and the violent stereotypes that cling to Black bodies in Britain, and she uses food as the mechanism: a painting can ask who gets to be seen as consumable, and who gets to do the consuming. Her paintings look playful at first sight and keep working on you long afterwards, from Wobbly with drink to the new body of work in Pity the Meat at East Gallery, Norwich.
13. Bex Massey, @masseybex Born in 1985 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and a painter whose soft realism renders images in oil, usually across relational pairs of canvases. Sweet foodstuffs recur in her work, familiar but not contemporary, and their images acknowledge female bodies with playfulness and real tenderness, while the codes and history of queer culture and markers of Northern identity run underneath. The Ágalma, My Deuce, My Double and There’s nowt as Queer as folk, shown with Seventeen Gallery, show a painter thinking hard about the language of display and what nostalgia is doing to us.
With the art season opening up for everyone, I hope this list with inspire and shed some light.
Thank you so much for the mention 👀💙