Award: Annual Juried Exhibition Featured 2020

Objective: Select any object as the focus for a series of woodblock prints

Concept: I began with my favorite food and a a film noir inspired photoshoot (wonderfully messy and tasty) to get reference photos of cake in interesting forms. Then I researched and found something interesting about cake itself: after WWII, boxed cake sales heavily declined because women who recently retired from the war effort labor force found it disappointing to return to cake baking and decorating. After making complex machinery and working the same jobs their husbands used to occupy, cake baking could not be nearly as fulfilling. I used this to inspire a celebration of strong American women who can do much more than just make cakes despite the roles they’ve been assigned. As for the prints, the first in color is a two block print while the other is a single block all hand carved in wood and run through the press.