sugar is forever

Love, Hope, Melancholy and Deceit  (rose, almond flowers, geranium, anemone)
mixed emotion series 2005
glass, royal icing, petal paste, edible colouring

Followers of dailymades might  have spotted the highly decorative cake topper (pictured at bottom of this post) dropped in amongst other creations made out hedgerow materials in recent days. Somewhat incongrous I know. How this came about was being asked to make a wedding cake for a friend of mine who knows of my sugar sculptures and installations. My interest in sugarcraft dates back a while, and oddly enough, came out of my interest weaving and needlecraft. The Tate Gallery asked me in 2005 to lead a lace making family workshop, linked to a re-hang of Tudor portraits paintings in their galleries  featuring elaborate lace fabrics. Thinking I couldn’t sustain the attention of my young participants with stitching (experience has taught me otherwise since), I suggested piping with icing instead to create lace patterns. The project was a great success with some 300 cakes decorated in a couple of hours. I’m sure the prospect of eating your creations at the end of the workshop contributed to this high level of production.

Sweet Nothings: an intimate history of cake decorating
Pump house Gallery, London, 2005

The project did whet my appetite (quite literally) and prompted me to find out more about using sugar as a material to work with. I took up a residency at the Pump House Gallery during the show Ceremony, co-curated by Freddie Robins. I presented the project Sweet Nothings: an intimate history of cake decorating where I invited visitors to decorate a cake according to a theme of their own choosing. I also got professionals in the field to lead various classes throughout the project. This is as close I got to any formal training in cake decorating.

Sweet Nothings led me then to look at the Victorian language of flowers, and produce a number of sculptures using sugar and glass. Red roses symbolise passion and love, yellow ones decreasing love and jealousy, while anemones means deceit to illustrate but a few.  I played around with positive and negative symbolic meanings, and created sugar flowers displayed under cut glass, its refraction interfering with identifying these and reading their meaning. I also liked the way the bitter sweet narratives also said something about sugar’s unusual dual characteristic of being both a preserving agent as well as a catalyst for decay.

Love, Hope, Melancholy and Deceit  (rose, almond flowers, geranium, anemone)
mixed emotion series 2005
glass, royal icing, petal paste, edible colouring

Mirror Mirror 2006
glass, royal icing, petal paste, edible colouring

Pot Pourri 2006
glass, royal icing, petal paste, edible colouring

I refrained of course from any such negativity when making the cake for my friend, sending out a positive message for the occasion with cornflowers for growth and riches, daisies for innocence, and ivy for truthfulness and eternity. I later added a rose to the topper seen below, for love.

cake topper, 2012