Statememt:
I am a New York based artist who learned to think and draw in kitchens. Piping intricate patterns onto cakes as 3- dimensional drawing sustained focus and gave credence to years of drawing on desks. I work out visual problems while on the clock addressing the need to keep moving and to learn by physically doing. Feeling how lines move through space connects me to ideas larger than myself. This process remains an organizing principal of how I understand the natural world. Working with edible materials directly informs my painting and drawing.
My recent layered works on paper, is a continuation of a long, obsessive practice, and a deepening of my visual language. I use pen, ink, gesso, sumi ink, graphite, charcoal, tempera, oil, food coloring Rustoleum and any other available materials to work and rework the flat surface until my hand harnesses momentum and sense of gravity transforming lines, curves and motifs to expand into space invoking tangible structures and places.
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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 confectionary 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, 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 drawing and painting.
Margaret and her work have been featured extensivly in print, TV and film an She has taught cake decorating workshops throughout the Europe and South America, & the teaches sugar- sculpture workshops in Italy, . Her current focus drawing and painting.
