Désirée Coral

I am an artist based in Scotland. I received my Doctoral degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland in 2024, and my MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. 

My artistic practice explores early global exchanges between the Americas and the rest of the world. Using a decolonial, transdisciplinary, and multimedia framework, I explore the ways in which knowledge is formed and how landscape shapes and informs it.

I see materials (including food) as active archives, carrying histories of change, power, extraction, labour, exchange, and movement. This inspires me to examine the deeply rooted relationships between humans, non-human species, and the environments we inhabit and the interactions, exchanges, and knowledge that have shaped landscapes, culture, and human settlements and still do and how that knowledge then becomes part of cultural and regional ontologies and epistemologies.

I study foodscapes, foodways, and raw materials, and in my most recent project, 'Essays on Salt,' I explore how historical fractures, narratives, and perspectives continue to shape contemporary life. I´m fascinated by how salt physically preserves the memory of changes in geological landscapes, reflecting shifts in human settlements.

I use the body as a pedagogical resource, an artistic element, and a sensory link to the landscape. My work includes multidisciplinary projects, installations, and collaborative projects like the 'Living Table' series. Inquiring beyond traditional narratives through site-specific embodied practice and material-based art installations, including video and sound collaborations. I invite viewers to interact and engage with material memory and to find within it the invisible trajectories and interactions part of our foods, foodways and food systems.

I am currently working on my research project, Essays on Salt.