Danish Pastries
Mon 23rd Sep 2013
This summer I’ve had the joy of a job in the city of Copenhagen. My architect friends Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats from Barcelona had been given the opportunity to do an exhibition about their social housing project, 111 Building, in the vast exhibition hall at The Royal Danish School of Fine Art & Architecture. At the same time, across town in the intimate storefront gallery at the Leth & Gori studio they showed work relating to four smaller project that preceded the 111 Building commission.
They asked me to be involved with this double-sited exhibition due to our mutual love of cake eating. Initially I made a pastry and biscuit map of Copenhagen, to link the two sites of the exhibition, which was photographed for the cover of the catalogue. I baked and iced biscuits to mark the train station, metro, bus and water bus stops, museums and landmarks such as Tivoli Gardens. Then, on my kitchen table, I rolled out pastry streets and bridges and the strøget pedestrian zone in oatmeal, icing parks and the many lakes, canals and the river directly onto the white tabletop. I created a pastry Copenhagen.
The storefront gallery at Leth & Gori studio was once a bakery and still retains it large windows and glass door making it a perfect canvas for the second part of my contribution. The brief was to paint on the windows the title of the exhibition ‘Ingredients & Cakes’ and the names of the four projects on show. I took inspiration from the old metalwork shop signs and the Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats office rubber stamp that I designed for them about 10 years ago. In Denmark the traditional symbol for a bakery is a pretzel suspended under a crown.
I mocked up the window design at full scale in the hallway of my home. It was the only place I could find enough wall space. I painted the rubber stamp inspired triangle areas and all the text onto tracing paper. For the crowns and the curves of the metalwork I made stencils. I then took all these paper patterns, powder paints, and gold leaf for the crowns out to Copenhagen.
I spent five long days working in the window. It was like a performance piece as I went up and down the ladder or lay on my belly painting in awkward corners and positions. Obviously the glass had to be clean, but to make it more complicated some grease was required to make the paint adhere, but for the gilded crowns there needed to be absolutely no grease.
At the end I was very content. The result was effective and it made people look at and though the windows, I finished on time and most importantly Eva & Ricardo were happy.
