I am a New York based artist who learned to think, draw and work 3 dimensionally in New York City kitchens. The rhythm of a working kitchen just suited me. Building cakes, I confronted issues of symmetry and perspective, silhouette and scale. Piping swags, pearls and arabesques, repeatedly, onto cakes was a form of 3 dimensional drawing that sustained focus and momentum. Working out ideas and the tiniest of compositional problems in real time, gave credence to school years spent drawing on desks. It was a defining moment. I embraced the process and it remains an organizing principal central to my perception of how shapes move through space.
I continued making art throughout my career designing cakes. A feel for working with perishable materials strengthened my hand with more conventional art materiaIs. Still, I painted with food coloring, I built a series of headless, sugar sculptures inspired by medieval reliquaries, and during a residency at The Museum of Arts and Design, I made 2000 intricately decorated sugar cups. Long standing questions about temporality and material worth were addressed head on during this project. Like shredding through the history of a complicated relationship, it was also a swan song to years of working with edible materials. This led to a rigorous ceramic practice which resulted in thousands of hand-built, piped and gilded, wafer- thin porcelain objects and vessels that teetered between form and function.
My most recent series of layered, large-scale works on paper are a distinct departure from past object-making, in that the flat surface allows shapes that were originally developed 3 dimensionally to be expanded upon and part of something bigger. These drawings allow shapes and classical motifs that I know so well to open up and transform into sweeping networks of viable infrastructure.
They are also personal accounts of learning by doing. Letting a fast hand go out and decide the story, gives my crowded mind something real to work with. I am interested in how the small picture informs the big picture. The deepening of long practice of producing, refining, repeating and modifying speaks to a larger grounding ethic that helps me to navigate the world.
ABOUT:
Author and illustrator of Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun (Rizzoli, 2001), Braun’s boundary-breaking approach to the confectionary arts has influenced cake decorators and design enthusiasts around the world. Braun’s work has brought her to a Royal Wedding in Middle East to decorate 2,000 cakes in the Queen’s Ramadan Tent, To Palazzo Grassi in Venice with a tiered, gilded sugar mosaic cake sculpture ; to Berlin to decorate a dance company in sugar; to a castle in Ireland with a rock star’s wedding cake; and to Brooklyn with a 30-foot-tall, day-glo exploding cake sculpture. Punctuating a long and fruitful cake decorating career she created 2,000 intricately decorated, hand-hewn cups made of sugar during a residency at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Her drive to produce, refine, re-define continued into a rigorous ceramic practice which resulted in thousands of wafer- thin hand-built porcelain sculptures and vessels. Her current focus is on drawing and painting.
Margaret and her work have been featured internationally in film, TV, and print including a stint as a nice reality tv judge. She has taught in Europe and South America, has conducted sugar sculpture workshops in Italy, . Her current focus drawing and painting.
