The Kitchen Story
The Kitchen Story is a series of photographs of Armley elderly people in their kitchens. Through portraiture and incidental images of recipe cards, baking tins, and kitchen ephemera, the photographs will act as an archive of local family histories and social traditions.
The act of baking is inherently linked with family, pleasure, and a sense of occasion. By photographing people in their kitchens I hope to be introduced to their family histories, stories of childhood, stories of parenting.
As Armley changes and becomes a home to people from other cultures, so do the tastes and smells from their kitchens. The Kitchen Story hopes to celebrate this diversity and highlight the wealth of experiences in our community.
Casey has now finished her series of portraits, and the results are beautiful. Come along to the Tiled Hall Cafe to see the Kitchen Story as a table top exhibition
Read her story on the Leeds Met website
To discover more about Casey and her work visit her website www.caseyorr.com
Hannah, 93, grew up and raised two sets of twins in Armley. She learned to bake in a coal- fired oven as a child. Baking was an essential part of keeping a home and Hannah was accustomed to regularly baking bread, cakes, and buns as well as all of the other food eaten in her household. She doesn’t like her new electric cooker. She tried it once after first moving in ten years ago. She hasn’t baked since. ‘It used to pass time. Every Wednesday. I miss that. I miss it. Buying isn’t the same, but what can you do?”
‘Needs Must’ is Prunella’s answer to my questions about why she bakes. Pru, 79, is the only woman I spoke to who sees home baking as an issue of economics. She first got interested in baking when the gas company came to her village to demonstrate their new gas ovens. “ The gas company would bring these demonstration huts into the village. We only had fire ovens then. The gas was very modern, this was the modern era.” She bakes regularly for herself and shares her baking with neighbours.
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"I bake most weekends with my daughter. I have always baked, was taught by my mother, and have a very dangerous sweet tooth. I bake because it creates space away from a sometimes frustrating, intellectual creative life. I bake because it reminds me of my mother and I live 3000 miles from her. I bake because I enjoy working out recipes and the relationship between the ingredients; and I bake because it’s creative and pleasure giving. My favourite recipe at the moment is for Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake. I like American recipes – like many things in our lives, it’s wrapped up in childhood, memory and nostalgia.
Getting to know the people at Armley Helping Hands and the women in The Kitchen Story has given me a new sense of the community that I live in. Besides being given access to their personal lives I was also given a new coat, a chocolate cake, a coffee mug, and a lot of apples. The Kitchen Story is about our changing domestic landscape, our relationship to the food we eat and the energy we use to prepare it, the role of women and the invisibility many of us experience as we move out of the nurturing role of mother and wife and into our old age" Casey Orr 2007