Faire ~ Issue 9

Stories of Salt & Starlight by Ruth Steadman

Saghar Setareh is an Iranian writer, photographer and cookbook author who has been living in Rome since 2007. In 2023 she published her début cookbook, Pomegranates & Artichokes (Murdoch Books/Interlinks Publishing). The book charts her personal culinary journey from Iran to Italy. It describes the many parallels that link Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food cultures and shows how ingredients and recipes – unconstrained by borders – are shared and transformed through the immigrant experience.

Marie Ducaté is a celebrated multidisciplinary contemporary artist who lives and works from an extraordinary loft space inside a restored early-20th-century shoe factory in the historical Armenian quarter of Marseille, France. Her poetic art dances between figurative and abstract and she ‘paints’ through many different mediums, including fabric, paper, glass, metal and ceramic.

Cecile Boudon has a way with colour, and every inch of her 17th-century home in the South of France reflects her gift. Passionate about antiques from an early age, Cecile has dedicated her life to creating evocative, storied tableaux. In Paris she worked for many years as a trusted consultant for celebrated interior decorators and designers before making her way south to Provence to source and sell antiques with a coveted eye for colour and an ability to mix the old with the contemporary.

Tara Badcock is a visual and conceptual artist based in Northern Tasmania who graduated from the University of Tasmania at Hobart with a postgraduate degree in fine art. After spending many years living in cities pursuing a creative career, Tara spent a three-year stint in Paris, which was a textile-fuelled, life altering experience. Tara has spent the past 12 years raising children and endeavouring to maintain a creative career in textile art and design as well as exploring sculpture and installation. Tara has recently returned to live on the family farm with her children as a single parent to be able to focus on building a more symbiotic and restorative existence of art, gardening and self sufficiency skills.

Dorothy Cross is a contemporary Irish artist whose work is multidisciplinary, embracing sculpture, film, photography and at times, opera. Living in Connemara, Dorothy is surrounded and inspired by nature and the ocean. Her work looks at our place in the natural world in relation to time and the sacred, often playing with the intimate, forgotten or unseen.

Ernesto Collado had a career as a theatre actor, director and contemporary artist until the disease phantosmia robbed him of his sense of smell in 2014. A self-taught botanist, he embarked on a quest to heal himself through daily walks in the countryside of his native Empordà in Northern Spain. Today he is an environmental activist, educator and accidental perfumer who pours his indefatigable creativity into creating 100% pure, natural scents inspired by the landscape as a way to help people reconnect with their environment and with nature through their sense of smell.

Aurélie Alvarez is a French visual artist whose art explores the duality between science and spirituality, a journey to the heart of matter and colour. Her unique studio is in the rafters of an authentic 16th-century hotel particulier in the heart of the celebrated antiques town, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Provence, France. Her contemporary canvases feature simple and geometric patterns where she plays with overlapping layers and textures to echo ancient Tibetan mandalas. Her second collection, her decorative work, is focused on lightness and simplicity, a creative journey that leads us into the poetic and colourful universe of plants and animals.

Louisa Creed is a celebrated British rag-rug maker, beloved for her sensitive handling of colour and a painterly appreciation of form. Her first book, My Rag Rug Life, will be published by Rylett Press in July 2023.

Maja Larsson, a Swedish photographer and baker, and Irish carpenter Declan Clarke have consciously built a quiet life for themselves and their young family in a small farmhouse in Småland, Sweden. Their belief in living a slower, fuller life – spending more time with their two young children, creating a home and tending their garden – rewards them with a radical sense of freedom.

Venice: Art & Alchemy. A rare glimpse into the craftmanship, culture and tradition at the heart of contemporary Venice. We take you behind closed doors inside the ateliers of acclaimed creative and heritage companies Martina Vidal Venezia, Giorgio Giuman, Fernando Masone, Berta Battiloro and Fortuny.