Soho Revue Dinner in collaboration with their brilliant group show ‘Horse Girl’. Taking over their first floor space with its beautiful wooden floors and tall ceilings, I set about bringing enough hay bales in from a farm outside London to seat sixteen guests. With handmade plates set with miniature ponies, inspired by a chess board, and candelabra-vases depicting even smaller horses in the midst of miniature mountain landscapes. The dinner was sponsored by Showerings cider, leaving everyone with a sense of summer and a full stomach.
Guests also took home one of a kind ceramic keychains, which unfortunately remain undocumented.
Typescript · 14.07.26What does a horse girl mean to you?
The smell of hay bales piled up in the barn high enough to form a hazardous maze or a terrible bed for a midnight romp. As the summer grasses dry up under an obsessive sun all you can smell is that specific fragrance of sweat and warm leather, the butter scent of crisp stems that you know will ‘swish’ ‘swish’ as they tickle your stirrup irons and the belly of your horse into an excited buck.
Or the Knight on a chessboard of black and white movements. How the hell are you supposed to navigate the world as a woman? Knowing the black and white to be more of an ominous and somewhat obnoxious grey when put into comparison with the very real threat of trying ‘to command a twelve-hundred-pound animal’ and more often than not, succeeding.
Then ribbons and rosettes acting a very real but somewhat masked prettiness that obscures on occasion the fact that most days, you are put to work. Manual labour in the yard. Flies and manure and a whole lot of sweeping. Some initiation rite that does the important task of creating the discipline you will need in the saddle, and supposedly in the ‘real world’ when you are forced on occasion to hang up the bridle.
There is nothing more confusing than being a girl, except perhaps, being a Horse Girl.
Brilliant photography by Izzy Offer. Incredible food as always by Charlie Hills. Huge thanks for help in the kitchen and with service to Piper Delilah and Enna Frances. And a huge thank you to Soho Revue and Charlotte Leseberg Smith for the invitation and helping to bring it all to life.
