Hometown Hero: Ken Carson, Grailed, and ANT/DOTE Atlanta Team Up for a Limited-Edition Zine Release

What was the starting point for Pilgrimage?

It began with a series of sunset paintings I made in the Scottish Highlands in 2015, and a book called The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates, which explores an ancient relationship between nature, spirituality and the unseen world. Both stayed with me for years.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of a journey, not necessarily one with a destination, but one where the things you encounter along the way become the important part. Pilgrimage became a way of bringing together the four things that have always informed my creative life — art, food, music and supplies — and imagining them as parts of the same landscape.

With the space only being on view for five days, how did impermanence come into play when imagining this project?

At My first ever show in London at Hotel Gallery in 2004, I slept and drew on the walls of the gallery with a pencil for 1 month. There was nothing to buy.

I like things that exist very briefly and yet leave an impression. In many ways, that feels more natural to me than making something permanent.

A restaurant is already a temporary experience. You arrive, you eat, you talk, you leave. The room might remain, but that particular collection of people and moments will never happen again.

With Pilgrimage embraces that. To build a world that exists for five days and then disappears. There’s something romantic about the amount of work and love that goes into making something so fleeting.

How did your experience trekking and painting the Scottish Highlands impact this work?

The Highlands have always had quite a profound effect on me. There’s something about being alone in that landscape, the scale of it, the silence, the weather changing around you.

The paintings or marks are less about capturing a particular view and more about a recording of a moment.

I think that experience sits at the heart of Pilgrimage. The simple notion that movement through landscape can change your state of mind, that you find something spiritual in very ordinary things.

How does food play a part in contributing to the visual world of Pilgrimage?

I’ve never really separated food from art. Both are about making something, sharing something and creating an emotional response.

Food adds another dimension to the landscape. There’s colour, texture, smell, heat, movement.

At Sessions, food has always been central to the creative experience, rather than something happening alongside it. With Pilgrimage, the restaurant becomes part of the artwork, and the food becomes another way of experiencing the world we’ve created.

What do you hope visitors feel when they enter into Pilgrimage?

A sense of calm, first of all. Frieze can be an incredibly stimulating place, with so much to look at and absorb. I wanted to create somewhere that offers a little peace from all of that but still feels part of a discovery space.

But I also want people to feel curious. To discover things gradually, to notice something they might have missed on first entering, to feel that there’s a little mystery in the room.

I like the idea of combining comfort with the unfamiliar. Somewhere you feel immediately welcome, but where you can’t quite work out everything that’s happening around you. A kind of temporary refuge, with a little bit of magic.

After exploring Pilgrimage, the guests will be eating. How do you think this will affect their experience of the food?

I hope it changes their pace. I just want people to be comfortable.

So much of eating is influenced by what happens before you sit down. Your mood, the journey you’ve taken, the people you’re with, the room you find yourself in.

If we’ve managed to create a moment of curiosity or stillness before someone reaches the table, perhaps they’ll approach the meal a little differently. They’ll be more present, more receptive.

I don’t want people to feel they’ve walked through an exhibition and then arrived at a restaurant. I’d rather the whole experience feels like one continuous journey, with the meal being a moment to rest, enjoy and reflect.

With this experience bringing together artists, designers and architects such as Faye Toogood and Hattie Fox, how did you approach collaboration?

I tend to work with people whose worlds I’m already interested in, and often people I have a personal connection with. I think that makes a huge difference.

The starting point was to give everyone the same loose idea of a pilgrimage, but not dictate how they should respond to it. I wanted each person to bring something of themselves to the journey.

I’m not particularly interested in inviting brilliant people into a project and then telling them exactly what to make. The exciting part is seeing how differently people interpret the same idea.

There’s a certain amount of trust involved, and a willingness to let things evolve in ways you hadn’t imagined. That’s often where the most interesting work happens.

These collaborators brought their experiences using different materials. How did this expertise inform the tactile quality of the space?

Material is incredibly important to me. I’m drawn to things that feel as though they’ve had a life before you encounter them. Wood, stone, clay, metal, fabric — materials that carry the marks of the people who’ve worked with them.

We wanted the space to feel made rather than manufactured. Something with imperfections, weight and texture. A place where you might instinctively want to touch things.

Each collaborator has their own relationship with materials, and that brings a richness you couldn’t achieve through one person’s vision alone.

I think there’s also something very human about craftsmanship. You can see the collaborators hands all over the works. You can feel the time that’s gone into making something, even if you don’t necessarily understand the process. That felt particularly important in a project concerned with journeys, rituals and the passage of time.

What can a restaurant offer that a gallery or exhibition space cannot?

You get to live with and inside the work a little.

In a gallery, there’s often an unspoken distance between you and the art. You’re there to look, to consider, perhaps to understand something.

A restaurant removes a lot of those boundaries.

I’ve always found that much more interesting than asking people simply to observe something.

There’s also a generosity to hospitality that I love. You’re not just presenting an idea to someone; you’re looking after them.

For me, that’s a very beautiful way of making art.