The World Of THE WORLD OF
BEHIND THE SUN

Our icon is a medieval sun, redrawn from the Flammarion engraving, an anonymous wood engraving first published in 1888. That original work portrayed a traveller reaching the ends of the earth, and poking his head through to new realms of imagined futures.

The sun conveys the core of what we do. Night and day. Earthly and cosmic. We create worlds, and worlds revolve around the sun.

INTERVIEW, JEN MONROE
. An egg is the sun’s light refracted into life, 2023

“For my whole adult life,” says Jen Monroe, “taste has felt like an enormous force that dictates so much about the way the creative world works: how we ascribe social capital, who occupies positions of cultural power, how money and resources are distributed.” The celebrated chef, artist and food designer—who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York—dreams up edible fantasies under the moniker Bad Taste. She composes food “outside the hierarchies of the restaurant world”: food that’s funny, or that upends expectations of its own image and how it should be consumed. Among Monroe’s realized visions: cloud jellies for Coach, mushroom bao for Public Records, edible gardens and a tower built from cabbage leaves.

.
THE WORLD OF

Can you explain your commission for THE WORLD OF?

JEN MONROE

I wanted to push the piece in the direction of hard abstraction—to think about food as pure sculpture rather than something that looks delicious or even legible as food. The REBIRTH prompt immediately felt mythological; I wanted to incorporate imagery that felt very symbolic. Three classical symbols that spoke loudest to me were a skin-shedding snake, an egg and fire. After abandoning a plan for a large meringue snake, I decided to combine all three symbols by making a pearlescent scaled egg out of pulled sugar, suggesting a snake skin, or even a dragon egg. It would be lit on fire as a nod to a phoenix egg—or the more generalized metaphor of being reborn from ashes.

The scaly eggs take four-to-five hours to make and I knew we'd need more than one in order to get the shot right … I moulded still-hot cooked sugar into an egg shape by hand. To make the pulled sugar scales, I pulled and folded hot cooked sugar to incorporate air, which is what gives it its gorgeous, pearlescent sheen. When done right, [the form]appears to glow from within. Once I attained that level of iridescence, I moulded scales by hand and used a blowtorch to attach them to the completely cooled egg.

.
.
.
THE WORLD OF

For some time, you’ve been producing candy sculptures in pulled sugar: marvelous, shiny silverware in the shapes of spoons and egg cups, chains and swans. Tell us about this process, and how you arrived at these forms.

MONROE

As a kid I was fascinated by old-fashioned pulled sugar stick candy that I’d see in gas stations and gift shops—even Christmas candy canes have some of that beautiful iridescence to them, and I always wondered how they were made … Several hundred hours in, I still feel as if I've barely scratched the surface [of sugar work], as if there are whole new forms, techniques and vocabularies I have yet to figure out.

The question about forms is a good one. When moulding sugar, you have to make your shapes pretty quickly, as there's a small window in which the sugar is pliant enough to be shaped, before it hardens enough that it'll shatter if you continue bending. Also, as you're making things by hand, perfectly regular or straight shapes are impossible. I've had the best success with irregular, rounded, organic forms, in a way that I imagine overlaps with a lot of ceramicists and glass blowers.

But there's a second way that I'm allowing material to dictate form. When done correctly, pulled sugar has a beautiful metallic luminescence to it. I wanted to push it further by making sugar look truly like metal … From there, [I started] replicating metallic objects in sugar, hence the spoons, cups and chains.

.
THE WORLD OF

Name one person whose brain you’d like to climb inside of.

MONROE

Peter Greenaway, who has made many incredible movies, but among them is one of my all-time favourites, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). His commitment to rigorous formalism inspires me every time: he treats each frame like a painting.

.
.
FURTHER READING badtaste.biz instagram.com/badtaste.biz Special thanks to Marcus McDonald (Artwork Photography)
INTERVIEW, ANAHITA MEKANIK
The Tehran-born, New York-based scent designer Anahita Mekanik conducts her interview with THE WORLD OF from inside a department store. Mekanik,... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, CHRISTOPHER COLONNA
In the mid 2000s, music duo The Bumblebeez—comprising siblings Christopher Colonna and Pia Colonna (AKA Queen ViLa)—catapulted themselves onto... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, HATTIE MOLLOY
The artist and creative director Hattie Molloy—who lives and works in Melbourne—erects strange, kaleidoscopic tableaus from plants, freezing them... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, JENNA LEE
Before Jenna Lee’s mother became an educator, she worked at a Japanese paper store—“so I grew up knowing about paper, how it works and how to... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, QUINN CARMICHAEL
“I have this desire,” says the 3D artist Quinn Carmichael, “to merge my practice with the physical world and explore sensory experiences.” In his... (Read more )
INTERVIEW, SEAN BRADY & BLAKE AZAR
Sean Brady is a makeup artist who conjures surreal apparitions and fearless, experimental studies in colour. Under his hand, eyes and brows morph... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, SECOND EDITION
When Amy Seo and Shahar Cohen founded Second Edition with Bill Clifton—a director of Robert Plumb Collective—they’d just wrapped their Masters of... (Read more )
.
INTERVIEW, TAIGA KITA-LEONG
“If the dancer dances—which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body... (Read more )
INTERVIEW, TROY EMERY
The zoomorphic sculptures of artist Troy Emery trade in absence, abundance and distortion. Take Grampians big cat (2022), a candy-pink creature... (Read more )
.
INTRODUCING THE REBORN SERIES
To celebrate the launch of THE WORLD OF (formally known as Kat&Co) and mark a new era for the studio––which has been crafting disruptive, highly... (Read more )