Sugar Memory
Amie Dicke, Sugar Memory 1
Amie Dicke, Sugar Memory 2
For a while I wanted to focus on reproducing and remodeling a series of sculptures I made just before I graduated from art school in the year 2000. During that period I started to explore the position of women in everyday life and the way they perceive themselves in relation to their appearance in public. While trying to position myself both as an artist and as a woman, I observed other women. I was looking for a personal style or a unique attitude or stance and, quite literally, tried to obtain one by studying the positions and shapes of the female body.
While standing on the threshold of a professional career as an artist, I decided to use my own body to express this search for a distinguishable position. Like a statue, I made a pressing of my legs from crotch to foot in marzipan coated with icing. The soft substance echoed the negative curves of my body. The sculptures were smoothly molded and resulted in conical pillars of sugar, one broad and the other narrow. The latter one is veiled in deep pink icing. The broad one stands astride, luxuriating in the sugary substance of honey-like transparency that slides down its thigh. The two sculptures are entitled How sweet is the space between my legs. The sculptures proved to be more fragile than I expected them to be. The baker who helped me prepare this project promised that they would probably last for several years. But as soon as they were finished the marzipan surface started to split and fall apart.
The memory of the constantly changing, uncontrollable sugar sculptures made me realize that I wanted to make them again and this time preserve the beauty of the “fresh” image.
What will happen when I make the How sweet is the space between my legs sculptures again of a more endurable material? They won’t crumble apart like the marzipan and sugar, the new tension is that they can break. Fragility will stay, but they won’t be sweet anymore. I have to start this project with a new approach. My aim is to perfect the representation of the “space between the legs”.
Amie Dicke
Sugar Memory by Amie Dicke was made in Albisola (Italy) in 2006 on occasion of the 3rd Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art.
