Tessa Straver

ARTIST’S PROFILE

Tessa Straver is a food artist and storyteller whose work explores relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Working from an animist perspective, she uses food, ritual, and crafted objects to imagine what it might mean to share nourishment with non-human beings.

Her practice moves between storytelling, craft, and multisensory experience. Through shared meals, handmade objects, and small gestures of care, she creates encounters that invite a different way of relating to the living world – one based on reciprocity, curiosity, and care.

Tessa works with a range of materials including ceramics, textiles, wood, leather, and plant materials, creating objects that support these relationships. Many of her pieces function as tools for gathering, preparing, and sharing food in collaboration with the living world.

Across her work, she explores how food can become a language for connection – opening space to listen to other forms of life and to reconsider our place within the ecosystems we are part of.

Read about Tessa‘s residency project in her own words… 

During this residency, I will continue my ongoing project exploring a friendship with George, the Blue Atlas cedar in the garden of La Moissie. Through ritual gestures, crafted objects, and visual storytelling, I will document moments of shared nourishment – gathering water, preparing tea, and offering ferments. The residency will focus on translating research begun during an earlier stay at La Moissie into a series of poetic visual scenes that bring the relationship between human and tree to life.