Recipes for Healing

A vibrant, ceremonial picnic titled Behind The Seen brings together food, textiles, handwritten memories, and symbolic objects. Surrounded by collaborators Ananya, Divya, Jess, Nasrah, Shythira, and Zahra, this gathering becomes a living archive of shared stories, ritual, and care. Neon and traditional elements converge, revealing unseen layers of identity, belonging, and feminine intimacy in public space.

About

Behind the Seen is a collective fostering an ongoing collaboration initiated at the Royal College of Art and extending beyond it. We believe in the power of collaboration and reciprocity to build networks of healing. Recipes of Healing is an art and cultural project that intertwines food, personal narratives, and collective histories to explore themes of belonging, heritage, nature, ecology, and identity. This comes to life through an immersive installation, where six women gather around a dining table constructed from elements reflective of our diverse backgrounds and unique recipes for healing.

These recipes transcend culinary traditions; they symbolise processes of healing, sharing, consuming, and reimagining personal and communal narratives. The project’s form is intentionally transient. Each dining experience is documented in spaces imbued with colonial, spiritual, or personal significance. Through shared meals, conversation, and the digestion of layered histories, Recipes of Healing creates a safe, collective space for reflection and repair — foregrounding food as a powerful medium for storytelling and reconnection to our roots.

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Team

Portrait of Artist
Ananya Sebastian
Black and white portrait of a young woman smiling at the camera. She has straight, shoulder-length hair parted to the side and is wearing a V-neck top. The background shows textured lighting on a plain wall, likely from sunlight filtering through blinds.
Divya Balivada
A woman with medium brown skin and straight, chin-length dark brown hair with blunt bangs looks at the camera for her headshot. She wears a black jacket with white stitching and silver buttons, along with a subtle chain necklace. Her makeup includes bold eyeliner and deep red lipstick. The background is softly blurred, showing abstract colorful artwork in tones of pink, orange, and blue.
Nasrah Omar
profile picture of Zahra
Zahra Mascolo
Designer Portrait at Barbican
Shythira Rajkumar
Profile Picture
Jess Hollis

Project Images

This gives a warm, intimate, almost ceremonial vibe - like a merging of daily ritual with collective presence. The presence of hands, flame, and clay cups invokes a tactile, communal experience. There’s a softness in the action and arrangement, yet a deliberate choice in colours and gesture.
Gathering in the Making
An embroidered tapestry anchors this intimate outdoor gathering, layered with personal textiles, handwritten memories, and offerings of food. Surrounded by vibrant plates, stainless steel vessels, and ritual objects, it becomes a sacred space of care, storytelling, and nourishment.
Table of Offerings
A stone statue draped with a patchwork of textiles, yarn, and reclaimed materials stands in a grassy park. The fabrics feature stitched words, bold textures, and red flower-like decorations. Accompanying text explains a feminist art project titled "Recipes for Healing," describing how the fabric represents collective memory, labour, and storytelling through tactile, layered textile work.
Threads of Reclamation
Hands emerge from the edges, collectively lifting a circular embroidered tapestry into sunlight. The cloth is alive with textures - sequins, stitches, ribbons, and fabric scraps—mapping shared memories and emotions. Against a backdrop of trees, the tapestry becomes both artifact and archive, embodying the collaborative labour of care, storytelling, and resistance, held in a gentle act of unveiling.
A Circle of Hands, A Circle of Stories

Project Videos