The Saltmother’s Table: A Coastal Feast

This October, gather at The Saltmother’s Table for a feast inspired by future harvests from Intertidal Allotment, a long-term project that proposes the world’s first coastal allotment on the north coast of Sheppey.

The intertidal zone is the area of seashore covered at high tide and uncovered at low tide, a place of rich biodiversity and a site of encounter. In this shifting space between the tides, the sea meets soil, the Thames Estuary meets the North Sea, fresh water meets salt, and humans meet non-humans.

Falling just after the Harvest Moon (the full moon nearest the autumn equinox), The Saltmother’s Table is a gathering to celebrate abundance and shared ritual through eating together. Conceived and prepared by artist and researcher Cherry Truluck, this free, celebratory meal will playfully make use of local ingredients, wild foods and the plants and animals that could one day be cultivated on community plots in a coastal allotment.

Join us in the halls of the exquisitely restored Sheerness Dockyard Church for a convivial gathering peppered with quiet moments for tasting the coast and sensing the tides. Each course will celebrate coastal ingredients and will also write an edible chapter in a new fable for Sheppey. The meal will honour ‘the Saltmother’, a guardian of brackish waters and keeper of the tideline’s many inhabitants. The Saltmother invites you to join her in tasting a meeting of worlds.

For those who want to, we invite you to precede the meal (and to work up an appetite) with a guided walk along Sheppey’s coastline. The walk will begin at 11:30 at Ship on Shore beach, where you’ll have a chance to view the current Intertidal Allotment prototypes, and end at the Dockyard Church in time for the start of the meal.

The meal will be served as a fixed menu with herbivore (vegan) and omnivore (including dairy and fish/seafood) options. We will endeavour to cater for any allergies as long as you notify us in advance, but please note that all the food will be prepared in a single kitchen.

Please select your chosen option at the point of booking and let us know if you have any allergies or access needs. It will not be possible to make changes on the day.

Sheppey Dockyard Church is a 6 min walk from Sheerness-on-Sea station. There is limited parking available at Sheppey Dockyard Church and additional parking nearby: along the sea wall in Blue Town (free) or at Bridge Street car park (ME12 1RH, £2.80 for 2 hours). Toilets, including disabled facilities, are available on the ground floor.

About Cherry Truluck

Cherry Truluck is an artist and researcher, who tends towards edible, convivial, collaborative and sometimes curatorial work. Her transdisciplinary practice explores symbiosis, attunement and interdependence in more-than-human ecologies, as both an artistic strategy and agroecological methodology. Working with community building, plant science, cooking, farming and performance, she seeks rhythms and temporalities in the dialogue that food creates between the body and the land, leading audiences on journeys of speculative fabulation through muddy landscapes.

Cherry has been working with food and conviviality as a means of exploring interlocking cycles of time and growth for several years, most recently collaborating with the Conscious Food Systems Alliance to embed mindful eating into her practice. She is also working on a PhD with the UK Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training and based at the University of Aberystwyth. Her research project,Pluriversal Porridge, is an arts-based/transdisciplinary enquiry into pluri-temporality in (agri)cultural food systems through the lens of the oat plant.

Recent performative feasts and exhibitions have included: Breathy Encounters (Od Arts Festival); Municipal Kitchens (nGbK Berlin); The End is the Beginning (Cement Fields/University of Greenwich and BIRCA, Bornholm); Chase and Chalke (Young Gallery Salisbury); Alive In Us (The Wilson Cheltenham), Out of Time (Dear Earth, Hayward Gallery); Rudimentary Rhythms (Delfina Foundation); The Oat and the Oyster (Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation).

About Intertidal Allotment

The Saltmother’sTable is part of the wider project Intertidal Allotment. Our 2024-2025 Intertidal Allotment events programme invites people to explore ideas and test out materials for a new community allotment on the north coast of Sheppey – a proposed functional artwork by artist Andrew Merritt, one half of the artist duo Something & Son. In spring 2025, we installed a variety of prototypes on the coastline at Ship on Shore beach, enabling the impact on the local community and ecosystem to be closely monitored. Intertidal Allotment is being delivered in partnership with a range of national and local organisations, including Ideas Test, Swale Borough Council, and Sheppey Matters. The prototype will be monitored by students from the School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent. The project is kindly supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and The National Lottery Community Fund. With additional support from Ideas Test, Swale Borough Council, and Kent County Council.

Find out more here.