Blank Canvas Workshop Series with Velvet Ramos: Chew for them they forget to swallow

Please Note: This is a 4-part weekly series taking place every Wednesday evening in October (7th, 14th, 21st, & 28th) from 5.30 to 9pm. You must be able to attend all workshops

What happens when a meal becomes a script, a space becomes something we wear, and an encounter becomes an act?

During her Blank Canvas residency, interdisciplinary artist Velvet Zoé Ramos brings together The Feast: Stoba, Interlasado, and Chew for they forget to swallow in an evolving project shaped by food, memory, mark-making and performance.

You are invited to become part of the process. Cook and develop recipes through taste and shared memories; gather words and stories for a collective script; make marks, prints and wearable pieces; help dress and transform the space; or experiment with these elements through performance.

You might take part as a cook, script writer, performer or space dresser, but the roles are free to overlap and change. You are equally welcome to come in, observe, talk, or simply spend time with the work as it develops.

Across the residency, ingredients, stories, objects and marks will accumulate and transform the studio into a living installation. The process will eventually come together through food, wearables, performance and a shared final act.

No artistic experience is needed. Bring curiosity — and, if you wish, an ingredient, object or prop that carries a story or memory for you.

 4-week recurring workshop series

 Dates: Wednesdays, Oct 7, Oct 14, Oct 21, and Oct 28

 Time: 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM each week

 Note: Attendance at all four sessions is required.

About Velvet Zoé Ramos

Velvet Zoé Ramos is an interdisciplinary artist from Aruba working across installation, performance, food, printmaking and participatory practice. Her work explores empathy, memory, identity and connection through play, material processes and shared experiences. During the residency, she will develop Chew for they forget to swallow alongside food, making and participatory encounters in response to Ayr and its communities.

Blank Canvas Residency Project

During the residency, Ramos will bring together different strands of her practice through a new participatory project developed in response to Ayr and its communities.

A particular focus will be the development of Chew for they forget to swallow as a first live act, alongside food, material processes and shared making. The public-facing studio will become part kitchen, part stage and part installation — a space where the work can unfold through encounters, conversation, observation and participation.

Coming from an island shaped by other waters, Ramos approaches Ayr with curiosity and attentiveness, seeking to listen and respond rather than arrive with a fixed idea of place. She is interested in the layers already present within the town — its food, stories, people and everyday encounters — and in how these might become part of the work.

The project considers regeneration as an ongoing process: something that shifts, decays, reforms and grows through collective attention and care.