Bread Sculpture

I have been working with bread and dough for the last two years. I like the feel of working with dough. You can knead it and thump it about. If you add yeast, it is all warm and soft to play with. Bread smells nice in the making, during and after cooking and also as it goes mouldy.

I made a series of 'breadheads'.

Breadhead No.1

sliced bread, milk

Breadhead No. 2

white flour, yeast
Breadhead No 3

sliced bread, milk

I use white flour, wholemeal flour, salt dough and sometimes I add yeast to get a more unpredictable effect. I like using zips in my sculpture! Zips can show if I am feeling open or closed about something. The three pieces below are bread fragment no.1 , my hand and three blobs. I like making blobs - I often feel they represent little parts of me.

Bread Fragment No1

white flour, yeast, zip

Hand

white flour, yeast, zip

Three Blobs.

white flour, wholemeal flour

yeast, zip, paper, drawing pins

Bread Bodies


I have made 3 bread bodies. They are based on my own torso which I cast using modroc. The first one, I put out into the woods for 6 weeks to decompose and be eaten by birds and insects.

                                                  

The second one is called 'Anxiety' - I ate the middle out in a performance piece. It was very cathartic. In this photograph, it has been going mouldy for 6 months.

'Anxiety'

bread, mould

This is the third one, Menopause.  Toasting it with a blowtorch was an expression of how I was struggling with symptoms of the menopause at the time.

I like to keep them for as long as possible to see how they go  mouldy.  This one showed some interesting yellow mould.

This year I planned to make body No 4 a celebration of my life being up in Edinburgh and being at art college.  Well, as so often happens with art, the final piece turned out nothing like as planned.  We ended up cooking it for 36hours in the kiln at college so it was well baked and burnt in some places.   So I then had a sculpture that reminded people of the holocaust!  It looked a bit like wood in parts.  Adjectives to describe it from my peers were: traumatic, morbid, grim, sad, like dried meat,  body bag. There is a dichotomy with it looking deathly and like body decay but it being made from bread which has an association with warmth, nurture, comfort and feeding. I watched my response to it over the ensuing days and it was one of wanting to look after it, cuddle it and put it in a nice place with flowers. Hence the photograph of me with it in the art college grounds.

Here is the bread body, 2 months after, its starting to get very mouldy inside with the bread breaking apart.