Food has long been the subject of art in paintings, sculptures and elaborate recipe presentations. But for Elizabeth O’Rourke, who is completing a master’s degree at the Expressive Arts Institute of San Diego, the things we eat can depict a whole lot more than static symbols of beauty.

O’Rourke is the first and only student at the North Park institute to bring food into a curriculum that focuses firmly on five basic art disciplines – drama, dance, visual art, poetry and music. As a nutritional chef, she understands the wide range of feelings and associations people attach to food. Her challenge, however, was blending edible matter into the less tangible world of expressive arts.

The idea at first didn’t exactly pique the appetite of Judith Greer Essex, the institute’s founder and director. “I had a lot of resistance initially because I thought Elizabeth was talking about the art of presenting food. I didn’t want to give credit for cooking classes, nor was I interested in the dietary aspects of food, which wouldn’t fit into our paradigm.”

But after witnessing one of O’Rourke’s performance installations at the multi-use institute (located at 3817 Ray Street), Essex granted O’Rourke permission to write her thesis on the correlation between food and expressive arts.

The performance piece, held during the popular Ray at Night art walk, involved three different table seatings filled with about 20 walk-ins each. O’Rourke gave the participants various vittles such as walnuts, artichoke hearts, olives and spring greens. Their job was to sniff, smell, fondle and taste the items individually before jotting down the adjectives and nouns they incited.

The exercise resulted in the kind of piecemeal poetry O’Rourke was looking for. “We used the food as a springboard to evoke memories and feelings,” she said. “It was like a word salad.”

Phrases such as “tender mulch under foot” and “eating earth and sun” emerged before O’Rourke tossed all of the ingredients together into a bowl for another round of analysis. “The subjects’ descriptions, I noticed, then turned more community-based and less personal, through words that reflected support and sharing. I realized how evocative food is – how an olive could take someone back to their first trip to Paris, or finding their life partner.”

Says Essex: “The performance was an artistic approach to food that sold me. She created a community of strangers and teased out of them their associations and memories through the artful handling, presentation and sensibility of food. It was her poetry.”

In a dance installation dedicated to her mother, O’Rourke incorporated papayas, mangos and pecans to help illustrate her personal ancestry in Mexico. “If I had told the story of my mom without the food, it wouldn’t have worked. The food helps crystallize the art.”

Such was the case in her final performance at the institute last year, when she undressed her husband onstage and sprinkled spring lettuce over his body while reciting a love poem. The scene, she said, described her sensual bearing to food.

“Because food is so connected to gender, politics and religion, we can actually change our lives when we change the way we eat and view it. Food holds the stories of who we are. It is the only art form that can be smelled, tasted and digested.”

Essex agrees, adding, “There is no question that the gustatory sense and our associations with food could really belong to the common modalities used in the expressive art model. We were all enriched by Elizabeth’s understanding and research.”

The institute offers a fully accredited master’s degree program by the European Graduate School, and converts to a public gallery at every Ray at Night event, held on the second Saturday of each month. And while the curriculum remains steeped in traditional art disciplines, O’Rourke has created food for thought to those searching for artistic inspiration in their lives. The answer, it turns out, may lie squarely in that next head of celery you bring home.