Statement:
I am a New York based artist who learned to think, draw and work in pastry kitchens. Piping swags, pearls and arabesques, onto cakes was a form of 3- dimensional drawing that sustained my focus. I worked out structural and visual problems of composition, scale, and silhouette while on the clock. The rhythm and energy of a working kitchen suited my style of learning by physically doing. and gave credence to years spent drawing on school desks and all available surfaces.. I embraced the process because it grounded me and it remains an organizing principal of how I understand the world.
I made art throughout my cake designing career. A feel for perishable materials strengthened my hand for conventional ones. I painted with food coloring, built a series of headless, sugar sculptures inspired by medieval reliquaries, and wrote and illustrated a book about the process,. During a residency at The Museum of Arts and Design, I made 2000 individual, intricately decorated sugar cups. Long standing questions about temporality, material worth and my relationship with edible materials were addressed head-on during this project. This led to a rigorous ceramic practice which resulted in thousands of hand-built, piped and gilded, wafer thin porcelain objects and vessels that teetered between form and function.
My most recent series of layered, mixed media works on paper is an extension from past object-making, in that the flat surface allows shapes that were originally developed 3-dimensionally to be expanded upon in 2- dimensional space, and a part of something bigger. A long practice of learning by doing, speaks to a larger grounding ethic that helps me to navigate the world.
Bio:
Author and illustrator of Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun (Rizzoli, 2001), Braun’s boundary-breaking approach to the confectionary arts 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 on drawing and painting.
Margaret and her work have been featured internationally in film, TV, and print including a stint as a nice reality tv judge. She has taught cake decorating throughout the US, in Europe and South America, has conducted sugar sculpture workshops in Italy, . Her current focus drawing and painting.
