In Cuisine, an omelette or omelet is a dish made from beaten eggs quickly fried with butter or oil in a frying pan (without stirring as an scrambled egg). It is quite common for the omelette to be folded around filling such as cheese, chives, vegetables, meat (often ham or bacon), or some combination of the above. To obtain a fluffy texture, whole eegs or sometimes only egg whites are beaten with a small amount of milk or cream, or even water, the idea being to have “bubbles” of water vapour trapped within the rapidly cooked egg.
Thomas Robert Stockley (TRS) (former child and occasional statue), and William Myles Thomas (WMT) (artist and lactose enthusiast) proudly present OMLET (Or Maybe Let’s Eat Together), the much-anticipated culmination of a shared September residency at Back Lane West.
The fluffy omelette is a refined version of an ancient food. According to Alan Davidson, the French word omelette came into use during the mid-16th century, but the versions alumelle and alumete are employed by the Menagier de Paris in 1393. Rabelais mentions an homlaicte d’oeufs, Oliver de Serres an amelette, Francois Pierre La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier Francois (1651) has Aumelette, and the modern omelette appears in Cuisine Bourgoise (1784).
Featuring new individual and collaborative works, OMLET plays on the concept of food as art; whilst simultaneously being disrupted by digital works – a balance of comfort (eating) and discomfort
According to the founding legend of the annual giant Easter omelette of Bessieres, Haute Garonne, when Napoleon Bonaparte and his army were travelling through southern France, they decided to rest the lights near the town of Bessieres. Napoleon feasted on an omelette prepared by a local innkeeper that was such a culinary delight that he ordered the townspeople to gather all the eggs in the village and prepare a huge omelette for his army the next day.
In the space the viewer becomes participant. We are confronted by our immediate physical presence in time and space, manifest through art objects and the visceral act of consuming food. This reality is contrasted by the act of being transported out of the physical world, into a virtual reality where computers sing to themselves, eggs give birth and the very space you occupy is cracked and distorted
On March 19, 1994, the largest omelettes (128.5 m², 1,383 sq ft) in the world at the time was made with 160,000 eggs in Yokohama, Japan, but was subsequently overtaken by another, weighing 2950 kg (6,500 lb), made by the Canadian Lung Association at the Brockville Memorial Centre in Brockville, Ontario, Canada on May 11, 2002. In turn that record was the past on August 11, 2012, by an omelette cooked by the Ferreira do Zezere City Council in Santarem, Portugal. This record-breaking omelette weighed 6,466 kg (14,255 lb), and required 145,000 eggs and 10.3-m (34 ft) diameter pan.
A List of Works:
- A Pithy Observation (in Pink) WMS
- Virgin Birth TRS
- Urchin TRS
- Cold Cold Rejection TRS
- Toilet Banana WMT
- Egg.jpg 1 - 3 TRS
- Virtually Reality (Back Lane West) WMT
- Omelette Kitchen WMT
- Dastardly Difficult WMT + TRS
- Machine Love (Voice Recognition Software Attempts To Translate Love Songs Sung By The Computer) WMT
- Fakeritos WMT + TRS