Picnic: order, ambiguity and community

Text: Kevin Harris

Images: Gemma Orton

Published by Local Level using Bookleteer. 44 pages, fully illustrated in colour.

Book launch - free event - refreshments will be served - please register

We are grateful to the Wellcome Trust for providing the venue.

Copies of Picnic will be available to purchase on the night: standard edition £10.00.

A limited edition of 50 copies, with a special wrapper designed by Gemma Orton, will be signed by the writer and illustrator, and sold in aid of Crisis for £30.00.

About Picnic

People interact around food. Conventional mealtimes are ordered occasions when social relationships are reaffirmed. But picnic is different, often characterised by a wobbly combination of conviviality and disorder. So what does it tell us about the way we think of 'community'?

From the clamour of medieval feasts to mobile-enabled meet-ups with a sandwich in the park, getting together with food has always stimulated sociability. This text explores the history and social meaning of the picnic, and uses it to have a bit of fun at the expense of our contemporary obsession with 'community'. The essay uses reportage, social history, sociology, poetic imagination and illustration to challenge those understandings of social life that try to deny disorder, or insist on some mythology of unbreakable harmony.

Be prepared for a quirky and questionable read. And some gently anarchic images that stir the mix of community, ambiguity, and order.

With thanks to those who have already offered, we regret that we can't turn this event into a contributory picnic: the contractual arrangement between venue and caterer prohibits it, so please do not bring food and drink. Another time perhaps.

If you cannot attend but would like to order copies of Picnic, you will be able to do so here very soon.

If you register and subsequently find you cannot attend, please let us know: use the contact button on the right of this screen.

Kevin Harris is an author and community development commentator, and has written the Neighbourhoods blog since 2003.

Gemma Orton is a young artist recently graduated with an MA in Textile Culture. Working with pattern and order, her focus is site-specific art.