I am a New York-based artist who learned to think and draw in kitchens. Piping intricate patterns onto cakes was my 3-dimensional drawing. It sustained my focus and gave credence to years of drawing on desks. I learn by physically doing. When curves cut fast through space I feel connected to ideas larger than myself. This process remains an organizing principle of how I understand the world.
My recent layered works on paper are an expansion of visual language into pictorial space. I use pen, ink, gesso, sumi ink, graphite, charcoal, tempera, oil, food coloring, enamel, and other available materials. I like how lines, dots, and curves can turn into structures, shelters, and places, real and imagined.
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Earlier oil-and-food-color paintings led to a series of headless, gilded, sugar sculptures inspired by medieval reliquaries. I wrote and illustrated a book (Cakewalk, Rizzoli 2001) about the process. During a residency at The Museum of Arts and Design, I made 2000 intricately decorated sugar cups confronting questions of temporality, materiality, and monetary worth, followed by a rigorous porcelain practice and thousands of hand-built, piped, and gilded, wafer-thin porcelain objects and vessels teetering between form and function.
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Bio: Author and illustrator of Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun (Rizzoli, 2001), internationally known for her boundary-breaking approach to the confectionery arts, Braun 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, and redefine continued in a rigorous ceramic practice, resulting in thousands of wafer-thin hand-built porcelain sculptures and vessels. Her current focus is drawing and painting.
Margaret and her work have been featured extensively in print, TV, and film. She has taught cake decorating workshops throughout Europe and South America, & she teaches sugar-sculpture seminars in Italy. Her current focus is drawing and painting.
