Dec 20, 2024 Food
Artists Who Eat is by Ate Ate Ate, a podcast hosted by Sam Low and Jean Teng on everything food and culture.
You can listen to the full episodes and download the zine for free at ate-ate-ate.co.nz.
If you want to grab a zine in real life, head to their Instagram to find the full list of cafes, bookstores and galleries around central Tāmaki.
Artists Who Eat is made with thanks to funding from Foundation North.
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brunelle dias in conversation
brunelle dias is a figurative painter born in India but based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is interested in paint’s ability to illuminate transiency and the sacred felt within the everyday.
SAM: You are, I would say, a self-proclaimed foodie.
BRUNELLE: Self-proclaimed foodie…
JEAN: Do you like food? Do you think about food?
BRUNELLE: I do think about food, probably in a more pragmatic sense.
SAM: We’re diving in, real quick.
BRUNELLE: I think too carefully about whether I’ve eaten all my veggies. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I like to eat well.
JEAN: Does it make you feel better if you eat well?
BRUNELLE: I’m all about that holism life.
SAM: Before we get into all that… we made a dish in response to your artwork for the people to make at home. What did you think it was? How did it make you feel? And… was it good?
BRUNELLE: Firstly, it was really yummy. It felt like a warm, squishy belly; so warm and lovely, like a big hug. I’m imagining it’s, you know, like a stuffed banana pancake situation. I really enjoyed that it wasn’t too sweet, because I’m not the biggest fan of super-sweet things.
SAM: You’ve pretty much nailed it. It’s pancake, or banana roti in Malaysian cuisine. And it’s really soft, doughy… I almost call it like a blanket. Inside is stuffed with bananas. In your work, there’s a lot of blankets and there’s lots of bananas. When you put the two and two together, it was a no-brainer for me to do that.
BRUNELLE: I like the frugality of it as well. But you can still feel the specialness of it. You’re not going to eat that every day, but when you eat it, you’re gonna enjoy it and really relish it.
JEAN: You’ve talked previously about how there’s a beauty to your paintings that aim to capture the domestic everyday, almost like you’re trying to extend the mundaneness.
brunelle dias, girl so confusing, 1
BRUNELLE: Yeah. I’ve become interested in being present; it probably happened during lockdown. I started doing my master’s in 2021, I think, or 2020 and I couldn’t help but become more present. I was living at home with my family, and I just started to notice a lot of things I usually would ignore – like blankets and motifs, colours, bananas, symbols. Within those seemingly ordinary things, I became interested in elevating or extending, like you say, or even illuminating, something. It becomes less about the symbols being static, everyday, banal, domestic, but more about how they’re living with us. I think painting allows these objects to breathe and move, in a sense.
SAM: I feel like I could learn a lot from you, just living in the present, being more in the now. And you’re totally right. I mean, I’m no art connoisseur, but obviously I am in proximity to it all the time, and through photosynthesis, I absorb what is important to people and what type of artwork sings out from within. And I feel like yours is very much about paying attention and showcasing beauty that often is overlooked on the day to day. I remember seeing your painting of a clothesline. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen a more beautiful rack of drying clothes.’
JEAN: A lot of your paintings take place in the kitchen. You have a couple where you depict family members straining rice. Is there a particular reason why you wanted to capture those moments?
BRUNELLE: Maybe it’s specific to Asians, or anyone who cooks rice almost on a daily basis. It’s that sensation of, like, getting a facial while you’re straining hot rice, that I wanted to capture. I obviously was observing this happen every day. It looked like a waterfall – like this feels really beautiful. This feels so every day and so banal, but it could be magical, ethereal.
SAM: Question. There’s one painting where it’s someone with their legs crossed over, and then I think they’re on their phone. I was like, whoa, that is such a specific shot and a point of view that I wouldn’t ever think of in terms of painting it. But it was so relatable for some reason. And I’m just wondering for stuff like that, do you take a photo and then you go, I’m gonna then paint it?
BRUNELLE: I think becoming more present or just observing is a funny thing. Because you don’t observe it until you do, and then you can’t stop thinking about it, or can’t stop seeing it, and you see it everywhere. And I think that’s the magic of paying attention. And then what’s interesting with taking photos or, like, referencing is that smartphones skew perspective.
I don’t know anything about cameras. I’m such a traditionalist when it comes to art – I’m just a painter. But smartphones, they skew perspectives. You don’t see things as they actually are. Like, if you take a picture of yourself from the top, your head looks bigger than your body. So even taking a picture of this rice-straining activity, I used the phone as a tool to understand how I would envision a waterfall.
If I would hold it in a certain way, it would kind of skew and stretch like mozzarella. And then I think about that painting of my brother, actually, who was lying on the couch with his legs kind of crossed. I took a picture of him, which was probably not the most flattering position, but smartphones allow you to do that in the sense that I liked that his legs were kind of framing his face and himself looking at this phone. I like thinking about how bodies frame a picture – you don’t have to do all the work, the subject matter will do that all for you.
brunelle dias, who moved my cheese
JEAN: You’ve said you had a tumultuous relationship to food growing up, but that it’s developed now into a healthier relationship.
BRUNELLE: I think as children, what’s incredible about them is that you’re solely relying on taste and enjoyment and satisfaction. You’re not thinking about whether this thing is good for you or not good for you and no one is playing police. I mean, you’re not playing police. Your parents might be.
Something happened between that age and turning eight, nine, 10. Puberty happened for me quite early. I wonder whether that has to do with my dad passing away, whether there was some kind of stress or signalling in my body – I became very conscious of bodies and their connection to food.
And, of course, that’s pretty normal. But unfortunately, with the media and with movies and Hollywood and Bollywood, I started noticing that if you do this, you will look like this. And the aesthetic of beauty, or whatever it was that was plugged into my head, became a serious infatuation with not eating or not eating certain things and policing my life around that.
I just allowed it to consume me. In my early 20s, I tried being vegetarian for a little bit. I tried everything. And I never really understood the idea that, if you’re happy with what you taste, that’s actually more healthy and less stressful and good for your body, regardless of what you’re eating, ‘unhealthy’ or not. I say that in quotation marks, versus eating something like boiled carrots or boiled peas or whatever, and stressing about the effects of it. But that undoing happened in my early 20s when I met my now husband. I distinctly remember, he was cooking fried rice for me. This is when I was vegetarian and we weren’t dating. He just invited me to his apartment, and I saw him eat. And I’m not joking, I gagged when I saw this. He put a teaspoon in a jar of coconut oil, and he scraped it, and he ate the whole teaspoon. And in my head, this was like the biggest taboo you could ever do, because fat equals bad.
Since then, I think that experience slowly changed my perspective. Between the image of myself and how I viewed myself and viewed food, I wanted to just genuinely enjoy it, but it took a long time of undoing. I feel like now I’m in a place where I can genuinely eat something and just be happy. And not have to be bureaucratic about it, like, it’s my cheat day.
JEAN: You’ve talked about how you like to capture the consumption of food, because it’s something that’s ephemeral, but through painting, you can capture the feeling of it actually being a forever moment. I think that really caught me, because so many of my memories are anchored in scenes like that – in sharing food.
BRUNELLE: I recently worked on this triptych, and the main focus point is this pavlova, and there’s many hands serving and divvying up other desserts and the pav and the cakes. That painting was referencing Christmas last year at my partner’s family’s house, and I was thinking about ideas around family gatherings in general, where it can be kind of Cluedo-esque. You’re trying not to grab your fork too hard, or your knife. And you’re just focusing on the food. And sometimes food is the only reason that you can actually get along. I like the idea that sometimes it’s the only way to get people in a room. No matter who you are, we all have to eat. And we can be together in communion, and we can break bread.
SAM: Do you get inspired by the atmosphere of the room, or people’s reaction to a thing or activity? Is it more a particular subject? When you did the paintings of the bananas, was it about what was happening in the market, or was it more like, these bananas are dope and I’m going to paint them?
BRUNELLE: Probably a different reaction to different objects. In general, it’s more to do with my interest in light, and how light is reflecting, and how colours are being lit in that space. So the banana painting, for example, both of them had this backlit, illuminated feel to it. I am interested in motion and whether it’s rice waterfalls or light illuminating underneath a painting, through a painting – that to me is still motion. It’s more subtle. But then with the pavlova, it was that zesty, putrid green colour that I was like, I need to paint that. It interests me so much. It’s always colour that draws me in.
SAM: So, brunelle, I’ve looked at all your work, and I’ve created a food response using my skills and how I express art. Can you look at it and tell me what you see?
BRUNELLE: I’m drawn to this colour. My painting mind is going to raw umber, I’m seeing haldi [turmeric], I’m seeing Indian yellow. I’ve been using the undercoat for some of my paintings with this ink, it’s like an Indian yellow. And what’s interesting is when you initially put a drop of this Indian yellow, it looks brown, and when you smear it, it looks yellow. And I can see that here. My painting brain is doing fun things. I just love how colour can be multipurpose in that sense. When you build it, it’s one colour and then when you smear it, it feels like a different colour.
SAM: I wanted to emulate your paintings. The details are there when you really look for it, but when you take a step back, it makes sense as a whole. It reflects the warmth that you have in a lot of your paintings. I really wanted to showcase the ingredients of biryani, but also you don’t know if the meal has just begun or just finished. Things have been moved around and shared. It’s reminiscent of a feast.
BRUNELLE: As you’re saying all of this, I can’t help but think about the little gravy droplets that would be on our plates at the end of the meal… I’m especially enjoying the coloured rice. That to me is screaming biryani. That’s love. That smell of long basmati rice…
SAM: That took me a long time with tiny tweezers to put on the canvas.
brunelle’s top 3
Sunny Town China Taste
10–14 Lorne St, central city
Blue Rose
414 Sandringham Rd, Sandringham
Mezze Bar
9 Durham St East, central city
@brunellediaspora
Banana Roti
Makes 6
300g plain flour
3 tbsp butter (room temperature)
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp oil (vegetable, sunflower or canola), plus more for rolling
1 large egg
½ cup water
3 bananas, sliced (½ banana for each roti)
To finish:
drizzle of condensed milk
toasted coconut and slivered almonds (optional)
- In a large bowl or food processor, mix the flour, butter, salt, sugar and oil until combined.
- Add the egg and water, and mix (blend) until combined. Knead the dough with your hands for 5 minutes until the dough becomes smooth and the gluten has been worked.
- Divide the dough into 6 pieces, roll them into balls and brush with oil. Rest on a tray or plate covered for 2 hours or overnight.
- Oil a clean work surface to prevent sticking. One at a time, roll out the pieces of dough into thin sheets by pushing the dough out and stretching or fanning it (throwing it like pizza dough as it hits the oiled surface). Once a large, thin sheet is created, add banana slices in the middle and fold over the edges to create a square.
- In a large pan on medium heat, cook the roti on each side for 2–3 minutes until golden brown.
- Cut the roti into bite-sized pieces, drizzle them with condensed milk and garnish with coconut and almonds (if using).
