This food issue had been planned for some time. Throughout most of this year, I had been collating material from a variety of artists who depicted forms of sustenance in one way or another. Of course, sourcing material for an art magazine, my focus had simply been on gathering artistic impressions of our foodstuffs. I mean, this is Art Etcetera not Chef ’s Weekly, so why would I consider collecting images of real food?
Well, this was until I watched an episode of ‘The Great British Bake Off ’. Suddenly, as the adverts were about to commence, the supermarket sponsors of the show presented what appeared to be an orange. Except it was not. Indeed, much like Georgia’s steaks, pineapples, dinners and pasta dishes that you can see here – it was a cake!
In our previous issue, ‘Where do I belong?’, we explored, at length, the definitions of arts and crafts and, to me, hyper realistic cake making was both. Here was a skill that required both craftsmanship, namely knowing how to bake the cake, with artistic refinement, such as through the use of cake paint, to make a cake look like something else entirely. It is an infusion of arts and crafts that Georgia has cultivated and perfected over the past five years, as she has sought to recreate ever more complicated objects in the form of cake. Indeed, self-taught, driven by challenge and with a keen eye for detail, Georgia formulates her cakes, or rather she replicates various objects, with enormous patience. She also presents her work in a very theatrical way, videoing seemingly real objects, before then cutting into them, to reveal that they are in fact cakes.
As an outcome of her dedication to the craft, Georgia now receives commissions from large retailers, such as IKEA, to make hyper-realistic cakes for their marketing campaigns. Yet, like most things that grow organically (pardon the pun), Georgia has had to continually feed into her practice (these puns just keep on coming) in order to design such high-quality pieces – and, as we’ll explore, she has come a long way. I once attended a wedding in Canada, well the rural heartlands of Newfoundland to be more precise, where someone also told me that they had come a long way. Though, to them, it appeared that this distance was relatively short. ‘We’ve just come from down the road’ they said, ‘it only took us seven hours in the truck from St. John’s’.
