Abigail Hampsey + Bronzecast, JJ Sandham LTD and Artisan Food Producers

For artist Abigail Hampsey, food making is an act of preservation.

Running a wholesale bakery in Lancaster enables her to sustain her studio practice, creating a symbiotic relationship in which art and manufacturing continuously nourish one another.

Hampsey explores preservation in its broadest sense: from the traditional methods used to extend the life of food, to the ways recipes, rituals and shared meals carry knowledge, memory and culture between generations. At a time when industrial food production has increasingly removed the hand from the making process, her work celebrates artisan food production as a way of preserving both craft and community.

Working with independent foundry Bronzecast in Ormskirk who employ the ceramic shell lost wax casting method, Hampsey has cast breads and other foods in bronze, transforming everyday objects into enduring sculptures. The work draws a parallel between bronze – a material long associated with artistic value and permanence – and a simple loaf of bread, made from just a handful of ingredients, which she considers an increasingly precious object in contemporary society.

Hampsey’s new film, a work in three episodes that run concurrently for 13 minutes – the time that focaccia takes to bake in the oven – documents food production and traditional methods of food preservation including smoking, drying, curing, freezing and salting.

The episodes capture oral traditions of preservation, recipes, community and making; Hampsey’s daily life in the bakery and studio and time spent at JJ Sandham LTD, who have been crafting award-winning cheese from rural Lancashire since 1929, along with a network of artisan food producers, Llewellyn’s Restaurant, London and Bronzecast. Focus traces acts of making, baking and preservation across bakeries, foundries, farms and kitchens

The Artist

Abigail Hampsey is a multidisciplinary artist, painter, and baker. Born in Lancaster, she gained a first-class honours degree in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2019. After being awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award in Painting (2020–22), she completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and recently spent three months at The British School at Rome.

Alongside her artistic practice, Abigail Hampsey is a business owner, baker and market trader. Carving out an artistic practice in the North of England as a working-class woman, her studio has no threshold, seeing no delineation between the types of places or spaces in which her work can be made. Her process is fluid, fundamentally shaped by her lived experience of daily life. Her paintings reflect a lived reality rooted in the outdoors, a rural upbringing, and a slowly urbanising environment. While somewhat autobiographical, her work often references imagery from the art historical canon, drawing on allegory and archetypal narratives. Hampsey has a deep interest in indexical language, modes of display and object associations, seeing academic as well as whimsical language as equal modes of communication.

Website

The Manufacturer

As part of her commission, Hampsey has worked with the Ormskirk based foundry, Bronzecast; artisan food producers including JJ Sandham LTD and within her own bakery, Well Good Bread. Founded in 2023 with business partner, Michaela Wilson, Well Good Bread has become a successful wholesale bakery supplying focaccia to independent cafes, restaurants and markets in Lancashire and Cumbria.

In creating the film, also entitled Focus, and which sits at the centre of the exhibition, Hampsey connected with her established network of food producers, filming them in spaces that span domestic, commercial, industrial and community settings. The film depicts traditional making processes, from within the historic cheese-smoking factory to the artist’s grandparents’ home, capturing the sites and methods of food making and preservation.

Funders and Partners

With thanks to:

Bronzecast
Lune Valley Beekeepers
Llewellyn’s Restaurant, London
Lewis Bassett, Chef and Writer
JJ Sandham LTD
June Hampsey, Artist’s Nana
Josh Nicholson, Dairy Farmer

This Project is a Co-Commission with Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council and the University of Lancashire.