Join us for an in conversation event with photographer Celine Marchbank, discussing her forthcoming publication A Stranger in My Mother’s Kitchen. This is a five year exploration into the grieving process told through photographs, writing and her mother’s recipes. This work is to be published by Dewi Lewis through a crowdfunding campaign. Please support generously.

Celine will touch on her previous publication Tulip before introducing her new body of work, giving insights into the development of the idea and its journey to fruition. There will be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.

After her mother’s death in 2010, Celine started to clear her house out, sorting through everything she had left behind. As she stood staring at the boxes in her home, still in a state of shock, she started to discover her recipes, beautiful handwritten notes.

Her mother Sue Miles, had been a head-chef for 40 years; described in her obituary in The Guardian newspaper as ‘the doyenne of the British restaurant revolution‘ She was also one of the first female head chefs in Britain. Celine felt an overpowering need to do something with this, for her mother and for herself.

She decided to cook her mother’s recipes, to learn the things they hadn’t got round to and photograph the process. She wanted to feel the warmth of eating her mother’s food again, to feel the feeling of being nurtured and cared for once more. The recipes were haunted with memories; the smells took her back to moments they shared like nothing else, and the more she continued the more she felt connected to her mother.

But this is no cookbook. This is her exploration of the grieving process whilst retracing her mother’s life and legacy. Through this she learnt about her new life as a daughter, a daughter without a mother.

A Stranger In My Mother’s Kitchen will be published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in early 2022, a book that will share this universal story of loss whilst also celebrating her mother’s food legacy. The book includes colour photographs, writings on grief and a selection of printed recipes as inserts.

This book follows on directly from Celine’s first successful critically acclaimed book Tulip, about the last year of her mother’s life. Named Photo Book of the Month by Sean O’Hagan in The Observer and Photo Book of The Week by Photo-Eye, and featured in The British Journal of Photography, BBC News, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Creative Review, The Independent, The Telegraph Magazine, Vanity Fair and Photomonitor amongst many others.

Supporters can find the Kickstarter page here (campaign runs 3rd-30th November).

About Celine

Celine Marchbank is an award winning British photographic artist based in London. Her practice explores everyday life, fascinated by the quiet details of domesticity, with a particular interest in home. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally.

Celine is a lecturer in Photography on both the BA (Hons) Photography at Falmouth University and the MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at London College of Communication (UAL), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA).