Academic research is notorious niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd way to share her studies. The artist and design historian established in Birmingham translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume and matieral culture into edible replicas.
Hawkins bees batches cookies that she tops with royal cherry. Decorating takes a scientific turn because they use small brushes and a mini projector to trace images of William Morris’ graceful flower motifs or coastal scenes of English Delftware. Displaying a design on a single cookie can take between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. It is not surprising that miniscule calligraphy and portraits are the most demanding.
Hawkins merged for the first time and baking her research about ten years ago during the studies of non -bregated costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare Productions who investigated her class. “It felt like a fun way to look back on all the different design styles that we had treated all year round,” she says Colossal and added:
I continued decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my doctorate (mainly as goodies to spend during conversations, or as gifts for designers I interviewed), then branched and spent a lot of time doing cookieversies from other artifacts to stay busy during the pandemic.
Since then she has published an academic book on the subject and is a senior teacher at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and valued objects that are held within museum collections in lovely cloths.
A set was made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton ended his epic Paradise. Anchored by a subtly crossed portrait that evokes that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear directly from a 17th-century book.
Hawkins ventures further back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of earthenware shards inspired by objects in the Ashmolean Museum. With a curved surface to imitate the curvature of a barrel, the irregular shapes have fragments of different motives and figures on which they have one sgraffito Technology, a Renaissance method to scratch a surface to reveal the layer below.
The weathered appearance is the result of cutting a base of light brown-gray before using a writer tool to scratch and crack the royal glaze. Then she held these etchings with a mix of vodka and black dye to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth seeing This process video.)
Unlike a select number, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work Her website And Instagram.
