Base Ingredients was developed as part of my MIMA Kitchen and Garden Residency (2021-23).

From Spring 2021, I spent time in the kitchen and the garden, cooking, digging and discussing with MIMA Kitchen and Gallery staff, visitors, students and researchers at Teesside University and local producers to try to understand what the base ingredients are of the organisation – what makes it unique, how things work: what does work, what doesn’t work, the challenges, thinking about inter-relationships between spaces and economies, their relationship with the wider world (both on a local, national and international level) and thinking about the future.

Over the course of the Residency I organised several events and an away day for the MIMA team – to try to understand what makes MIMA, MIMA. So much of what an organisation is, the essence of it, is the people who are part of it, and their collective values.

The MIMA team decided for MIMA these ingredients are – Art, Knowledge, Care, Respect, Nourish, Magic, Support and Time.

The Residency culminated in Base Ingredients (2023), a card game which can be played in the MIMA Kitchen featuring the MIMA ingredients, accompanied by a document outlining a set of guiding principles co-produced with MIMA staff (which will be periodically revisited as part of their business plan), a wallpaper installation and launch event in September 2023 with historian Jane Levi.

Please click here to read an interview about the work with Kate Moses, MIMA Public Programme Assistant Curator, in September 2024.

Photos: Rachel Deakin