Artist Sarah Taylor Silverwood continues her collaboration with Pershore Riverside Centre on an exciting new commission. Having worked with young people from Pershore in 2024 on the Wild Imagination animation for National Trust Croome, Sarah is co-creating a cookbook and dinner service for use by their local community. Read this blog post below written by the artist to find out what they’ve been up to.

We’ve had a busy year so far working together on every element of co-designing a recipe book and ceramic dinner service. The young people from Pershore Youth Centre have been cooking, eating and reviewing food and drink recipes, making illustrations, designing aprons, coming up with their own typeface, and making page backgrounds. In one of our sessions we used food as stamps with paint to make patterns, which will become part of the graphic design for the book. Some of the group are really into photography and have been documenting the sessions with a camera, and others have been interviewing staff and young people about food. 

Over the Easter holidays the group had a trip to Modern Clay in Birmingham, the ceramics studio I co-run. They have been working on inlaying plates with colour to create beautiful designs around the theme of food. We had a 3D printed pottery stamp made with the project title ‘Youthy’s Fantastic Food’, using a font designed by one of the group. This will mark each plate on the base. They also had a tour of the artist studios to find out about the day to day life of working artists, and to find out more about my practice and the types of work I make.

Over the next few months we will be bringing together all of our design elements into the final publication, including editing recipe submissions from the Pershore community. I’ll be in production mode, creating more plates, which will come together with the young people’s designs for a celebration community dinner later this year. 

The project has been an opportunity to explore the potential of co-design and collaboration at every level. We hope the legacy of the project will live on through the cookbook, but also in other aspects like the aprons for the youth centre kitchen, the plates, and their’ continued exploration of the creativity to be found in food and art making.

Youth Group Cooks (working title) is inspired by how the young people cook and share food at their youth group sessions. Sarah will be running regular workshops to cook, draw, design and make together. The young people will learn how to design, edit and illustrate the recipe book, using their own illustrations to design a ceramic dinner service guided by Sarah.

Wild Imagination is on display at National Trust Croome until March 2026.