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.

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.

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.