Art You Can Eat: Pola Sutryk Is Blurring Lines Between Food And Art

“I’m a multidisciplinary artist, food artist, cook, chef, forager. It definitely changes depending on the context — it’s all of these things at once and neither at the same time,” says Pola Sutryk, by way of explaining what she does. “I just juggle all these different names.” Originally from Poland, Pola has spent the last five years in Reykjavík, but her home culture remains deeply rooted in her work. By night, she bartends; by day, she immerses herself in creating edible installations that foster connection: waste feasts crafted from scraps and wonky veggies, edible sculptures, and jello — so much jello. Pola is certain of one thing: food art is slowly but surely having its moment. After all, we all eat, don’t we?

I’ve been working with food somehow since high school, first as a side job in a cooking school for kids. I was running classes for kids, doing special culinary classes for schools and cooking for birthday parties. That’s where I got my interest in food. Then I was studying pedagogy, so I was interested in the teaching aspect of the job that I was doing. But over the years in university, I realised I liked the cooking part of it more than the teaching part and the kids part, so I started cooking professionally in restaurants and culinary events as an assistant.

“I started to realise that the things I do with food fit more in the arts world than the gastronomy world.”

Five years ago, I moved to Iceland, and when Covid hit, I had a lot of free time. I started to realise that the things I do with food fit more in the arts world than the gastronomy world. I started doing more organically, one step at a time. Using food as an artistic medium is a very fast-growing movement. More people got interested and started inviting me to collaborate on different projects, or commissioning things from me.

On the side, I work as a bartender. For financial reasons — but also, it really helps me. When you’re freelancing, it’s hard to leave your job. You just think about work all the time. For me, it’s been really helpful to have another job that’s not related to food and cooking, where I can just turn off that aspect of my brain.

Working restaurant

One of the first big projects I did was at a post-artistic festival in Poland, where I organised a pop-up restaurant inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark restaurant’s food. It’s a project from the 70s that was a “working restaurant,” employing artists to work there as cooks because they couldn’t make a living from their art. We did three dinners for the festival’s audience, sharing a communal moment of eating together with hands.

There’s more produce in Poland, both seasonal local ingredients, and interesting things from around the world. So obviously, I can cook more interesting things there. But I really like the challenge of Iceland. I learned a lot from having to figure out what to cook with the small amount of ingredients we have.

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I’ve been foraging since childhood, and it was fascinating to get to know Iceland and see what plants here are the same as in Poland — the ecosystem I know from childhood — and which are new to me and specific to Iceland. For example, learning how to cook and use seaweed. That was something great that Iceland gave me because I’ve never lived by the sea before.

Waste not

One of the areas I’m interested in is food waste and how to prevent it — ways of using all the parts of produce that we have. Reusing scraps, dumpster diving, and using unwanted food to prevent waste. Because we waste a lot. In Iceland, it’s very, very visible, because we have to rely on imported produce so much. We bring most of the food we eat from abroad and often it gets damaged during transportation or in storage. Both the importing companies and shops that we sometimes collaborate with see that as a problem, and really want to reduce waste. For me, it’s a very important subject in times of climate crisis.

Together with Elín Margot, we’ve done a few waste feast projects, using unwanted and discarded resources. We forage, dumpster dive and collaborate with companies by taking their produce that they have to throw away and then cleaning it — picking the good parts from the bad parts, and cooking with all those that are still good and fully usable.

I’ve been vegetarian my whole life, but I mostly try to cook vegan because I think it’s the most inclusive way. Most people can eat a vegan diet; this is just the simplest, most ethical and closest to me way of cooking. But it’s difficult. Locality is very important for me, so in Iceland, local fish would be way better for the environment than soy/vegan produce shipped here from the other side of the world. But since I’m a vegetarian, I never learned how to cook meat or fish. It’s not something I know.

Bizarre bites

Any project I do is always fully edible. It’s not only there for visual effect, it becomes part of the audience as it disappears on a very physical level.

“Any project I do is always fully edible… it becomes part of the audience on a physical level.”

I’m constantly learning about food. I love reading and watching movies about it, and my social media algorithms mostly show me food-related content — recipes from different parts of the world, food movies and books, cookbooks, and even old cookbooks. I remember, for example, researching brauðterta, a Scandinavian dish that might seem very weird to people outside of those countries. It’s a sandwich cake — a birthday cake made from bread, mayonnaise, and various fillings. It’s also a popular traditional dish in Iceland. For me, coming from abroad, it was a very weirdly flavoured tradition. During my research, I looked through old magazines, translated recipes, and studied pictures, trying to create my own version using AI. Looking at this connection — both me as a foreigner and AI as a new technology, we’re learning about this local tradition.

I love jello! I work with agar, which is a vegan gelling agent made from agar-agar seaweed that mostly grows and is harvested around Japan and Korea, but with climate change, it also starts appearing in places that it wasn’t growing before. It’s one of my favourite substances to work with. It’s very fun as you can achieve a lot of different textures with it. I’m constantly finding new ways to use it. Once, for a Buxur rave, Natka Klimowicz and I did a sculpture and jellies with electrolytes because I really wanted to do something that supports you in partying in a healthy but fun way.

Cooking up landscapes

This piece [pictured below] was for a collaborative event with artists Natka Klimowicz, Katie Hitchcock, Kosmodod, knackered, XWIFE, Jadzia and Hell Moonk. We’re doing a tour in Poland, going to three cities, and creating a multidisciplinary evening, combining a poster exhibition, a dance performance, audio-reactive visuals and a live concert, as well as a food installation that reacts to the dancer and reacts to the audience when the audience interacts with it.

The goal of our tour is to showcase the Icelandic DIY scene to the Polish audience. We’re all drawing from our personal experiences of Iceland and what it means for us. This food installation represents the Icelandic landscape and different elements of it that are dear to me or inspired me in some way — there’s edible black sand and dried jelly crystals that look like ice pieces on black sand, and crunchy edible moss and things like that. How did I make the black sand? It’s just crushed, blended Oreo. I had to take the cream out of 10 boxes of Oreo cookies to make it.

Universal medium

People are generally very open and interested in interacting with edible art. More and more people are learning this as an art language and more often know how to interact with it. Something I really like about edible art is how inclusive it is as an art language. We all eat, and we all know how to eat, so seeing an installation like that everyone can ingest it and take a piece of art with them.

On a planetary level, we definitely have to learn how to produce food and eat food differently, just for our own survival and for the planet survival’s. Food is a crucial element of our culture, and how we eat dictates how we live and how we operate as a society. The food culture is definitely changing, but it needs to change more. I really hope it will.