Step into the world of Lucy Folk’s Longevity campaign through the culinary creativity of Grace Gloria Denis. A visionary who sees food as a medium, Grace crafted meals infused with seasonal Provençal flavours for our shoot, each dish a celebration of nature and artistry. Her approach merges sustainability with a deep reverence for the earth—an ethos that perfectly mirrors Lucy Folk’s.From lavender-roasted almonds to peach infused creations, Grace’s dishes transformed the set, invoking the spirit of a true Provençal summer and inviting a deeper connection with nature’s bounty. Continue on to read our interview with Grace where we discuss the convergence of food, art, and life.
"Collaborating with Lucy Folk was a dream - the whole team has such generous and warm energy that inherently made working together feel very organic.
I admire Lucy’s celebration of the natural world and her commitment to sustainability, which feels like a rare pearl in the realm of fashion. The way she articulates her vision with a wholehearted and passionate approach is contagious to be around."
What does Longevity as a way of living mean to you?
Longevity encapsulates a duration that traverses beyond the instantaneous; it is a reverberating echo, a slow breaking wave, a year-old ferment, a garden yet to fruit. Longevity as a way of living invites us to cherish what currently surrounds us and reminds us of our agency in shaping what is to come.
What inspired you when designing the menu with Lucy for the shoot in Marseille?
I was inspired by peak of summer Provençale flavors as encountered in the lavender roasted almonds. The omnipresent fig leaf made several appearances in the menu, which perfume the coasts of Marseille in August, most notably in the panna cotta and fish. The menu was an homage to these floral and ephemeral flavors of summer.
What daily practices nurture your creativity and passion?
Stretching, writing, and vipassana meditation are my recalibration tools. Spending time outside is imperative as well, sometimes something as simple as walking to the nearby village for a coffee or collecting wildflowers for home. And dancing every day.
What book/s are you reading that inspires you, and why?
Mahmoud Darwich’s Bed of a Stranger, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez’s Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, and Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant.
Describe the below ‘Ode to the Long’ in three words:
Long Conversations: meandering, melodic, magnetic
Long Moments: exhalations, embraces, effervescence
Long Summers: salt, sand, siestas
Long Friendships: tenderness, oasis, tears
Long Movements: elasticity, unraveling, expanses
Long Meals: ebullient, empty plates, empty bottles
What’s your current ingredient obsession?
Habibi Tahini which is a sesame cream fabricated in Jerusalem, cold pressed in a traditional stone mill. Orchestrated by dear friends Hussam Ghosheh and Maram Nazzal, Habibi Tahini mobilizes resources for Basta Land, a project syngerizing learning, exchange, production and rest, based on agricultural land in Palestine and Spain. It is the most delicious tahini I have ever tasted and reiterates the fact that food is political.
When you think of cooking and longevity, what springs to mind?
The first thought that comes to mind is the temporal frame inherent to cooking and cultivating food, which naturally corresponds to longer durations and the notion of cyclicity. Both the domains of cultivating and processing food have become increasingly accelerated due to the onslaught of industrialisation and monopolisation within the agri-food system. The idea of longevity in correlation to food beckons us to extend beyond the immediate, rethinking techno-scientific fixes, in order to contemplate how actions today can contribute to a more equitable and sustainable future food system.
What surprises you most about what you have learned through food?
The fact that it never ceases to surprise me - I learn something new every day.
Where did you shoot the Longevity Jewellery campaign images?
The jewellery campaign was shot where I live with my partner in the mountains in Spain.
You shoot with film mainly; what do you love about the analogue process?
I have always been enchanted by the alchemical element of film - there is something quite romantic about being alone in the dark and developing images. I used to teach darkroom photography to kids in a non-profit organisation and the sensation of collective awe is something that still holds resonance.
Between projects – what do you do in your downtime?
I oscillate between experimenting in the kitchen, or re-arranging it, alongside reading, working in the garden, or spending time with my dog. If I am fortunate enough to be near a body of water during my downtime, I am either swimming or surfing.
With your project, Aural Oral, a series of site-specific studies and sensorial junctures in agricultural research, tell us about the recording process.
Aural Oral is a series I have been working on for eight years that proposes resonant reflections on processes of cultivation and consumption. It couples an audible archive of ingredients with their ingestion, proposing a multi-sensorial approach to food systems that traverses beyond the domain of the gustatory. In the series, I implement various microphones, such as hydrophones and piezos, alongside field recordings to sketch a sonic cartography of sites of food production. Aural Oral draws reference to acoustemological research, articulated by Stephen Feld, valorising methodologies of “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible.”
What have you got on your Lucy Folk Wishlist?
I gravitate towards the food-inspired rings and love how Lucy draws inspiration from the vegetal world in the design of her jewellery. My favourites are the Watermelon Pip Ring and the Peach Ring in sterling silver, which are elegant references to forms and textures I liaise with on a daily basis.
We recently discovered the book you edited From and With: Exploring Collaborative Survival, which interviews everyone from botanists to artists to agricultural producers and more – tell us about how this book came to be.
My book In, From, and With: Exploring Collaborative Survival examines the notion of embodied pedagogies through a series of invitations to digest the concepts in the lexicon, whether it be through walking, fermenting, or another type of exercise. It takes anthropologist Anna Tsing’s proposition of collaborative survival, which describes how our (human) ability to persist as a species is deeply entangled with and dependent upon the health of a multitude of other species, as a point of departure. The book is a sort of experimental cookbook, including edible and non-edible recipes, that collates a series of terms selected by twenty-four contributors, ranging from botanists to artists to farmers and more. It explores the possibility of reading and doing as a means of metabolising, braiding together practice and pedagogy.