Supermarket 2010

Harvester is the name of a restaurant chain in the United Kingdom. These restaurants, which also function as pubs, often occupy converted coaching houses that once served the major trunk routes, Britain's transport arteries before the construction of motorways. Following a network of ley lines and located on prehistoric sacred sites, Harvester restaurants reverberate with the powers buried in the soil beneath their faux rural interiors; interiors which are festooned with fake farming implements harking back to a fabled rural idyll. Removed from any real context these scythes, trowels and ploughs serve as fetishes or ceremonial objects in the practice of an unnamed worship. The menu is meat based and there is an overpowering stench of the cooking of raw flesh. The all-you-can-eat salad bar, a rustic timber-clad stainless steel industrial server, is bathed in the warming glow of overhead spotlights with offerings laid out like specimens in a medical laboratory.

At the apex of this sinewy network stands the Beulah Spa overlooking the vale of Croydon. Here initiates of the Cult of the Harvester congregate to cast their seed upon the sterile asphalt of the carpark and around the thickly carpeted floor beneath the salad bar. This act of sacrifice reveals the mystic outlines of the fabled paradise of the Trondant Spit: Domain of Chefly Appetites where conscientious carnivores contemplate happy meats.

For [the] Evidence at Supermarket 2010, COTH presents JISM: The Trondant Spit - Domain of Chefly Appetites, their latest series of limited edition ceremonial artefacts commemorating initiation into the Cult of the Harvester.

Cult of the Harvester is an on-going collaboration between Simon Neville and Sarah Sparkes. The COTH was founded in June 2009 at Chutney Preserves III: The Voice of Chutney, an event that took place on Camberwell Green. This was followed by an installation in September 2009 for Deserters at the abandoned Nunhead Community Centre as part of Nunhead Arts Week. In March 2010 the COTH will publish JISM in the forthcoming ISMs issue of [the] Evidence.