Napkin Set - À table with Johanna Dumet

In French-speaking countries, “À table” is the ubiquitous call to eat, to sit and join others when food is ready. For her napkins, Johanna Dumet created a set of unique prints, each with their own playful depiction of food and wine, inviting us to see the white space of the table as analogous to the raw space of a painting, beseeching us, as one napkin reads, to “Get dirty and enjoy your food.” Eating is ritualistic, wild, and a place for uncivilized behaviour, though it is often treated as just the opposite, and the cultivated napkin is a symbol of the desire to keep things nice and neat when we gorge. But maybe this icon of cleanliness can be put to other uses.