"sculpture" news and stories

This is Liz. She's an artist who works in a very delicious medium; Jell-O.

In this particular clip, she shows how she fashions San Francisco's entire Mission District out of the gelatin dessert.

The process is simple, but tedious: Liz takes pictures of the District, and then uses the photos to build molds out of balsa wood and foam core. Then, she builds silicone rubber molds around the sculptures, and when they dry, she makes the Jell-O and lets it set in the molds.

(Oh, and Liz makes Jell-O the way us normal people do, but sometimes she adds additional coloring to make the sculpture more vibrant). She also sprinkles dry Jell-O around the model to represent streets and parks).

One caveat about working with Jell-O (besides the overwhelming urge to consume your sculptures, of course) has to be the fact that eventually, it gets moldy.

But instead of letting that ruin her work, Liz uses the moldiness as a metaphor for change and adaptation within urban areas.

Here at Slashfood, we tend to post a lot about food art. Like, a lot.

So, obviously, I didn't hesitate when I found these crazy creations. Made primarily out of produce and baguettes, these ain't your grandmomma's food sculptures.

The images have that creative, slightly eerie feeling of those in Joost Elffers' books, like Food for Thought.

For more, go here.

The CurdNerds unearthed this ridiculous video of Professional Cheese Carver Troy Landwehr fashioning an enormous block of orange cheddar cheese into - what else? - the Statue of Liberty.

The video is sped-up and set to music, and is as much a music video for the background band and an ode to oily, bland cheese as it is a promo for Showtime's State of the Union TV show.

In a world of the Wing Bowl and extreme cake decorating, the only obvious next activity to gain status was cheese carving. There are a few nail-biting moments there toward the end, when a crack in the statue's oily, curdy base threatens to topple her. But - spoiler alert! - Landwehr prevails, and to my relief, the statue is completed, carved cheesy torch and all. Although, at times during the video, if you squint, the sculpture bares a strange resemblance to Bart Simpson.

You remember: she's the chewing gum fanatic in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who broke a world record by chewing one stick of gum for three months straight. And we're guaranteed that Maurizio Savini would be her hero.

Savini's chewing gum sculptures have getting a ton of press lately, probably less for artistic merit and more for pure gawking value. For the record, all of the gum he uses is un-chewed, and according to a bio on nonprofit art foundation Pastificio Cerere's site, Savini chose gum as a medium for its barrage on our senses and because it reminds him of childhood.

Check out more of his sculptures here, and then give us your opinion.

Candy Addict recently did a review of several graphic artists that paint and sculpt with chewing gum. I think my favorite of the three they list is a series called Gum Blondes by artist Jason Kronenwald. His Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe are great. Candy Addict also mentions GumArt, a collection three-dimensional works from veteran gum artist Jamie Marraccini. These sort of recall the stop-motion animation of early Peter Gabriel videos. Finally, there's Ben Harben, whose Bubblegum Society art (above) imitates the bubblegum life of reality television with portraits of stars from shows like American Idol and Survivor. Candy Addict also has info on "Chew by Numbers" kits.