Saturday, August 22, 2009

Strangely Sugarfree

There's a first time for everything - no sugary hijinks here!

Just plaster on painted ply, applied much as I would (and really, only know how) royal icing on iced cake, with piping bag and piping tip (and the occasional nudge with a clay modelling tool or two)! PS: There will be flagrant use of exclamation marks in this post, that's how surprised I am at the results! It really looks just like icing!

Not very explicit snaps - just random bits and corners of a 2300mm by 1800mm folding triptych - but I don't want to quite spoil the surprise when the thingy does become, sometime late-ish September 2009.

For virtually as long as I've known Shing we've talked about doing something sort of along these lines. She'd shown me itty bitty teeny weeny pictures on her camera phone of some crazy cool embellished wall she'd spotted travelling (suffice to say she has a killer eye and laser sharp taste in these matters), had a major "What if?" moment, and I lucked out by being in the right place at the right time.

The result is these plaster-iced panels, which will form part of the Fall/Winter 09 display at Strangelets, the splendid little shop at 87 Amoy Street (Tel: +65 6222 1456) purveying a carefully curated collection of curiously chic covetables, from eccentric Astier de Villatte faience inspired by 17th and18th century table services (see the lovely Keiko's exquisite showcase of the Parisian boutique here) to chintzy ritzy transfer-printed Burleigh earthernware to David Weeks' Hanno the articulated beech gorilla, just to name some esoteric examples.

I am amused to no end by the fact that I am now in possession of two large boxes of piping tips. One, the older, simply labelled PIPING TIPS, the other, the newer, PIPING TIPS: NON-FOOD USE ONLY!

The motifs are very much inspired by fascinating plates of radiolarians and other majestically beautiful organisms from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (or Art Forms in Nature), as well as W. A. Bentley's photomicrographs of snow flakes as reproduced in Snow Crystals, a breathtaking revelation of nature's marvellous diversity in uniformity.

8 Comments:

Anonymous flory said...

c'est belle! oh it's so beautiful

12:43 pm, August 22, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

this is not only crazy cool, but crazy beaauutifuul!

9:12 pm, August 22, 2009  
Blogger marjlet said...

beautiful...
thanks!

2:42 am, August 24, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Greetings! Sugary or sugar free, you are an artist J!
-E.L.

12:39 pm, August 24, 2009  
Anonymous keiko said...

Joycelyn - I knew your talent and creativity have no boundaries, but this is so inspiring and what an exciting project to work on! Can't wait to see your exquisite work in situ, hope you'll share it too... take care, kxxx

8:44 pm, August 24, 2009  
Blogger Camemberu said...

So amazingly beautiful, these!

9:27 pm, August 25, 2009  
Blogger Weylin said...

lovely! I am excited that you are at strangelets. work down the street and am a big fan.

10:00 pm, August 29, 2009  
Blogger by Persis said...

Dear J,

I've been reading your blog for years and am a fan. May I say, you have an amazingly aesthetic eye and the touch of a true perfectionist.

Have you ever heard of Divine Chocolate? Excuse me if this is not normal comment etiquette, but I just wanted to share about it with a fellow chocolate fiend.

Divine chocolate is a UK (now also US) company with a revolutionary business model, where the cocoa farmers own 1/3 of the company and sit on the board of directors. This means two primary things: fair price for cocoa farmers and, most importantly for me, no child labor.

It clearly departs from the Fair Trade model, and most definitely from the ubiquitous gourmet likes of Valrhona and Scharffen Berger.

I discovered Divine whilst I was living in London and, for some reason I can't remember now, started reading a lot about cocoa farming and the chocolate industry. Am now a big fan. Would be happy to lug a few bars back to Singapore next year if it isn't readily available there yet.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could change the world through the way we choose to eat too?

Ai

12:02 am, September 03, 2009  

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