My name is Simone Johnson and I’m a Colorado born, NYC bred interdisciplinary artist currently based in Queens, New York. Culinary Art House (previously Cosmos to Kitchen, previously cactusflower’s cooking journal) is a long-term mixed media project that focuses on cooking and other topics like foraging and wild foods, seed stewardship, zero waste, energetics, sensory studies, somatics, movement and the body.
Through collage, photography, audio recordings, sound art and writing, I capture these areas of study mostly through a spiritual lens, reclaiming and embracing uncensored ‘woo woo’ ways of knowing and art-making. These topics are also explored through personal, cultural, political and ecological viewpoints.
Since high school I have been volunteering or working on urban farms, while also learning about local food systems and food justice. I’m currently a student at Farm School NYC.
My interest in cooking stemmed from always feeling a weird dissonance between learning how to grow food but not really knowing what to do with particular foods afterward, or just being disconnected from cooking in general without understanding why.
A few years ago I found myself gravitating toward the culinary world, wanting to attend The Natural Gourmet Institute. Because culinary school is expensive and almost every chef I’ve talked to has recommended I learn by working at a restaurant, I have created my own, ever evolving syllabus to guide me along my journey. I am still in the process of finalizing it and will post it shortly.
In the meantime I would like to share my monthly practices, which include:
1. Mindfully preparing and cooking food
2. Gardening when I can
3. Developing and working off of the 2020 Culinary Art House Syllabus
4. Building a Culinary Art House Library
5. Making mixed media collages 1x a month
6. Cultivating Small, But Mighty Seed Library
Culinary Art House is first and foremost guided by curiosity. It goes where it goes with reminders along the way that at the end of the day, cooking by myself and with/for others is the heart and soul of this project.
My collages created in 2018 and 2019