When it is Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s stunning sculptural oversize works, her latest stands out from the cake. The well-known artist has spent the last five years creating an almost 40-foot high 3-tiered gateau of woodland situated in the English countryside.
Set in a lush forest is a vast, engaging patisserie with a whimsical, immersive feel that sparkles in a glossy, icing-like finish and is covered in 255,000 ornamental ceramic pieces. It’s a sculpture that is such an architectural delight. The delectable piece is embellished with pastel-colored cherubs sitting upon pedestals and mermaids made of ceramic and stunning dolphins who release water out of their mouths. Vasconcelos revealed an absurd amount of pure joy for the general public this week (it will remain on display until the 26th of October).
Wedding Cakewa s ordered by the collector and arts philanthropist Lord Jacob Rothschild for the Waddesdon estate located in Buckinghamshire, England, and is located next to the 19th century dairy, which was constructed in the 19th century by baron F19th-centuryRothschild to entertain guests at his famed party at Baronome. “The vision, imagination, and ambition exemplified in the Wedding Cake is a perfect match for the passion which drove Baron Ferdinand to build the manor and the dairy, where he intended that his many friends would be surprised and delighted at every turn,” Lord Rothschild declared in an announcement to the press.
The materials utilized reflect the various influences of the international world on her Portuguese home tradition over the years, with themes inspired by carnivals as well as Chinese or Japanese ceramics produced by the Viuva Lamego factory which is operating in the city of her birth, Sintra, Portugal, for more, than 170 years. In a more fundamental sense, the work, officially titled wedding Cake but affectionately de, scribed in Vasconcelos Wedding, the “impossible project”–expresses the artist’s ongoing fascination with femininity and love and the conflict between the public and private worlds. “I have been addressing the subject of love through my career for almost 30 years now, but this is my biggest challenge so far,” she wrote in the press release. “Many artists have the ‘impossible project’, and this is mine.”
In terms of how the installation is enjoyed in the present, Vasconcelos encourages people to explore three different ways to view the artwork: “Looking from the outside, enjoying the surroundings from the different levels or balconies, and rising to the top, finally completing the artwork with their presence,” she states.
Although Vasconcelos has worked in various art forms, she’s most well recognized for her massive sculptures of large scale that raise ordinary objects to the level of. In the fall of last year, Vasconcelos took over an area of the Jardin des Tuileries by creating an expansivetooktwork and ved as the backdrop for Marea aria Grazia Chiuri’s fashion show in the fashion house Dior in Paris Fashion Week. The previous year she sported a massive Octopus–a patchwork of crochet, velvet, beads, sequins and LED lighting–to the main square at the Macau’s MGM hotel. And who could forget her sparkling 16-foot change composed of Hotel00 tampons, which she exhibited at the Venice Biennale? When you consider the legacy Vasconcelos has left when it comes to art, her latest creation is just the icing over the cake.