SWEET ART
Is it our inner child that makes us love art made of sugar? Maybe a little. Is it because it is so clever? Sure. But these pieces grab our sweet hearts and tug our souls because they are bona fide masterpieces, regardless of the medium. The fact that they are made from sugar is icing on the cake!
Why make art out of sugar? Does the sugar add anything of aesthetic value? Does it make a statement? Does it have meaning? Does it have special qualities as a medium? Yes to all of the above.
Like castles made of sand, sand paintings, and sidewalk chalk murals, some art made of sugar has a wistful beauty, here only for brief moments before it vanishes without a trace. Some pieces play up sugar’s crystalline properties. Others have a political message.
Photo: William Lamson
The “Solarium” sits on a quiet hill in the middle of a field in Mountainville, New York. In the distance, it looks like a simple tiny shed. As you wind your way up the path, the jaw-dropping beauty of it hits you.
Artist, William Lamson created the “Solarium” when he was commissioned by the Storm King Art Center for the “Light and Landscape” show in late 2012. The piece is built on a steel frame and fitted with 162 panels of transparent sugar “stained glass.” The colors reference a warm, mid-summer sunset. The different hues achieved by caramelizing sugar at different temperatures.
Lamson has worked with sugar before. He once removed the panes of glass from windows in a gallery space and replaced them with sugar panes. Unlike “Solarium,” however, the installation was meant to be impermanent, changing and melting as the sun moved. His newly refined process for creating the “Solarium” is fascinating and captured below in Kate Barker-Froyland’s short film.
William Lamson - Solarium from Storm King Art Center on Vimeo. Video: Kate Barker-Froyland
In constructing "Solarium," first, Lamson melted sugar until it caramelized. Next, he heated panes of glass in an oven so that they would not crack when he slathered hot sugar on top of them. When the molten sugars reached his desired colors, he then poured them on top of the panes. Once they cooled, he placed another set of glass panes on top of them, letting them adhere to the sticky, solidifying sugars. Then, he sealed the edges with silicone to prevent water from leaking in and sugar from leaking out, creating a series of beautiful reflecting sandwiches, which he then assembled to form the house.
Photo: William Lamson
The “Solarium” is not just a spectacular art piece. It is a fully functional greenhouse for three species of miniature citrus trees. It is also a pastoral sanctuary, for inner reflection. Thoreau would likely have loved it.
Photographer Matthew Albanese creates sweet likelife landscapes. His photo series, “Strange Worlds,” is constructed from sugar, along with other materials, like feathers and cotton backing. His glaciers are sugar. The trunk of a weeping willow is carved from chocolate. The grass underneath a twisting, black tornado is ground parsley. “Paprika Mars” is made of, well, you can probably guess that one. The results are staggeringly beautiful.
Albanese’s artistic journey began, as many do, by accident. He was cleaning his New Jersey studio when he knocked over a jar of paprika. The spilled spice had the color and texture of a Martian landscape and he immediately envisioned his first landscape.
Since then, Albanese has created dozens of hyper-realistic landscape photographs, all of which will be displayed in his new book, “Strange Worlds,” (September 2013, Lazy Dog Press).
Shelley Miller has been making art out of sugar since 2001, using a variety of techniques, from piped frosting to hardened sugar tiles. Her most recent work, “Throw-Up,” (2012), was commissioned by Scotiabank in Toronto, as a performance art piece, entitled “Nuit Blanche.” Miller and a team of assistants created it in front of hundreds of onlookers, as a series of “throw ups,” a street art term for graffiti pieces put up quickly.
Miller makes important statements with her site-specific works, asking us to consider sugar-related issues, such as those tied to consumer culture, excess, and waste, as well as to the historical links between sugar and slavery. She has created dozens of gorgeous installations around the world.
Photo: PJMixer
The pieces appeared to be standard graffiti at first glance. Upon closer inspection, the tags were actually great, sweeping patterns that were not spray-painted, but piped in royal icing. Miller and her team used piping bags and palette knives to apply the icing, bring an exquisite sweetness to urban walls. Accompanying signs warned, “Look, Don’t Eat.”
Australian artists, Tanya Schultz and Nicole Andrijevic, have been inspired to create the candylands of their dreams, using enough sugar to make a generation of dentists wince. Under the moniker Pip & Pop, they work with a variety of sculptural and painting techniques, they trip out on sweet stuff. Sometimes, they get a sugar-high, as they work to create their colored sugar floorscapes series, in a method similar to Tibetan Sand Mandalas, a time-consuming artform meant to allow the artist an opportunity to meditate during the creative process.
Schultz and Andrijevic create chaotic, glittery, color-bombed landscapes, murals, vignettes, and frocks. They are soaked in Japanese kawaii, the quality of “cuteness,” an aesthetic particularly popular in Harajuku, a city known for its kawaii fashion center. Their installations feature mountains of dyed sugar, lilliputian origami cranes, tiny plastic giraffes, and bright pink mushrooms covered in glitter. They create utopias, composed of bubblegum pinks, cotton candy pastels, and lush psychedelic hues.
Photo: Courtesy of Little Black Book
In a recent interview with “Dazed Digital,” Schultz explained why her preferred medium is sugar: “I really love stories about paradise and imaginary worlds, but especially stories of lands made of food. It’s an ancient kind of fantasy that exists throughout many cultures. There’s the French mythological 'Land of Cockaigne,' a place where sugar rains from the sky and the streets are paved with pastries; or 'Big Rock Candy Mountain,' a hobo's idea of paradise; or Willy Wonka’s 'Chocolate Factory.'”
Pip & Pop recently collaborated with the outré fashion label, Romance Was Born, to create a dreamscape runway where models could prance between mountains of meringue wearing “Mushroom Magic,” the team’s Summer 2013/2014 fashion collection at the 2013 Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia. The beautiful pandemonium of colors, patterns, and pop gave the fashion world a major sugar rush.
To read more about the intersection of food and art, read our post about chefs inspired by modern art, Let them Eat (Mondrian) Cake.
To read more about art created out of temporary mediums, see our post about Tony Plant’s Beach Art and our post about Stunning Snow Art.
