Strangely Sugarfree

There's a first time for everything - no sugary hijinks here!

Just plaster on painted ply, applied much as I would (and really, only know how) royal icing on iced cake, with piping bag and piping tip (and the occasional nudge with a clay modelling tool or two)! PS: There will be flagrant use of exclamation marks in this post, that's how surprised I am at the results! It really looks just like icing!

Not very explicit snaps - just random bits and corners of a 2300mm by 1800mm folding triptych - but I don't want to quite spoil the surprise when the thingy does become, sometime late-ish September 2009.

For virtually as long as I've known Shing we've talked about doing something sort of along these lines. She'd shown me itty bitty teeny weeny pictures on her camera phone of some crazy cool embellished wall she'd spotted travelling (suffice to say she has a killer eye and laser sharp taste in these matters), had a major "What if?" moment, and I lucked out by being in the right place at the right time.

The result is these plaster-iced panels, which will form part of the Fall/Winter 09 display at Strangelets, the splendid little shop at 87 Amoy Street (Tel: +65 6222 1456) purveying a carefully curated collection of curiously chic covetables, from eccentric Astier de Villatte faience inspired by 17th and18th century table services (see the lovely Keiko's exquisite showcase of the Parisian boutique here) to chintzy ritzy transfer-printed Burleigh earthernware to David Weeks' Hanno the articulated beech gorilla, just to name some esoteric examples.

I am amused to no end by the fact that I am now in possession of two large boxes of piping tips. One, the older, simply labelled PIPING TIPS, the other, the newer, PIPING TIPS: NON-FOOD USE ONLY!

The motifs are very much inspired by fascinating plates of radiolarians and other majestically beautiful organisms from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (or Art Forms in Nature), as well as W. A. Bentley's photomicrographs of snow flakes as reproduced in Snow Crystals, a breathtaking revelation of nature's marvellous diversity in uniformity.