Clarendon Creative Dinner Party: what sustains us?

40 artists, thinkers, and creatives participated in an artful and experimental progressive dinner party at the newly-launched Clarendon Creative Retreat in Clarendon in the Adelaide Hills.

The theme of this event was ‘what sustains us’. Together, participants ruminated on the future of South Australia’s newest artist and thinker retreat, Clarendon Creative, through playful exchange and the discussion of the conditions required for creative thinking. 

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As part of the 2017 Adelaide Festival of Ideas, the event took place at the former home and studio property of Noela Hjorth, an Australian artist and builder of houses, known as living sculptures. Her paintings and sculptures reveal a fascination with the female form, spirituality and ecology.

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Participants were selected by lottery application and bussed to the site in the community of Clarendon, 40 minutes outside of Adelaide. All guests were asked to ‘bring something to the table’ as a provocation in the form of food, art or thought. Their offerings represented something that sustained them as a creative: something they had grown with their own hands, tasted symbolic of their cultural heritage, a recipe that reminded them of their mother, or another poetic expression contributed to the event.

The dinner party was devised by Marnie Badham and produced by Amy Milhinch.