ALCHEMY

I was brought up with bread making being an existential, and therefore integral, part of the weeks work. My grandmother baked, my mother baked and even my father baked bread. Not just one at the time but often in batches of 6, that filled the house with the unmistakable aroma of yeast and freshly made bread.

I once read that the grain looses 40% of its nutritional value, i.e. energy, only a week after the husk of the grain has been broken and milled into flour. A lot of the flour we buy have been milled months ago and stored badly in too warm and light conditions and have consequently lost a lot of its original energy. The only solution is to eat bread made from freshly, ground flour. 10 years ago I was given an electric grain grinder; a beautiful, wooden contraption with a stone mill inside.
This transformed my bread making into an aesthetic experience where every part of the process revealed its own richness of beauty. This is a ritual that I, or my husband, has performed weekly - often aided by our children who have had the important role of stopping the flour overflowing while being milled and then mixing all the dry ingredients together. Whilst doing my MA in Dartington, UK, I didn´t bake, and thinking of the process in perspective compelled me to follow it with a film camera. I did not want to reproduce the process as I remembered it. Neither did I want to create a romantic propaganda film or an information video to teach people how to make bread. I simply wanted to observe my own experience in the process of making bread and to communicate the sensation, the energy and subtle transitions from one matter to another - the chain of physical and interactive events creating a whole coupled with the magic - the alchemy of bread making.