Frosted cake and confectionary ornaments enhance or mask the meaning of many celebrations. For example, sugary flowers, pastel eggs, marshmallow chicks, chocolate bunnies, frosting ribbons and other decorations hover above the meaning of Easter, a holiday commemorating a resurrection only made necessary by a preceding crucifixion. This mixed media piece, “Frosted Cake and Other Delights”, is composed of poplar sticks of various lengths, propped at various angles, each adorned with a welter of hybrid animals and plant forms in candy tinted Model Magic and “icing”. The piece addresses parallels and recurring cycles of grief and bliss.

The wooden pieces, sold for construction, are made to last. Model Magic, marketed as a children’s medium, is non-toxic, self-hardening, foamy- when- fresh, light and fragile when cured. It’s long term properties are unascertained.

 The formal composition reflects this uncertain mix of durability and impermanence. The metamorphic Model Magic forms are frozen in tableaux ambiguously suggesting symbiosis and predation, whimsy and menace. The piece asks its viewer to consider the relations between nostalgia, pleasure, consumption, fragility and perdurance.