Her Dark Materials - a collaboration
One of the great things about Netherton Foundry is the people we meet, the friends we have made and the great talent we get to collaborate with.
And we love being able to showcase their gifts and skills.
When lockdown began, so many of our friends and contacts in the food world saw their own worlds looking very different – gone the bright lights of commissions, meetings, reviews to be replaced by a cloudy haze of uncertainty, within the enclosure of four walls. No more leaving the house to gather around tables of food and drink, whether that be to review it, celebrate he book from which the recipes were written, sign contracts for books and articles or to photograph it.
We thought about all those people we know whose livelihoods had been upended overnight, who rely on getting out there and being socially close, not socially distant.
Then, in a lightbulb moment, we saw an opportunity to do something that has been at the back of our mind for ages. Get Ros Atkinson, aka @her_dark_materials to photograph our bakeware, what could be better?
And if the photographer can’t come to the bakeware, no problem, we just send the bakeware to the photographer and let her get on with it. No meetings, no concept conference, no mood board discussions, no campaign framework – just free rein to use her amazing creativity. And we knew that to get the shorts, she would have to use the products, so we get a review thrown in too!
The results, predictably, were more than we could have hoped for and inevitably unpredictable.
We gave her a cake tin, so what did she do with it? Made a pie, not just any pie, a beautiful spanakopita. And then she took the most beautiful picture of it.
Because this is what she does best – takes you by surprise, stuns you with her talent, sends you staggering sideways in admiration.
We gave her a baking tray, “oh, that’s going to be tricky”, she said, “but I will think of something”.
Of course she did, a tray of buns, glowing, burnished like her favourite copper pots, a stark and stunning contrast to the matt black baking sheet..
This is what we love, why we love her and her work – inspiration, imagination, edible artistry.
Channeling the spirit of the Old Masters, her photographs are anything but still life; they stir, evoke, they nourish, refresh and sustain, they transport you to another place, one where food is abundant, ripe, tempting, where all cookware should be dark, stark and beautifully functional.
She may call herself Her Dark Materials, but there is a light within these photos an inner glow, a focal point of illumination that somehow suffuses the entire composition.
Be more like Ros, unrestrained by convention, but disciplined in her attention to detail, never predictable, unique, a mistress of visual artistry and trickery, unique and to be honest, completely bonkers!
Thank you Ros, for making our bakeware look so utterly fabulous.
