Have Your Cake & Eat It Too (2021) is a diptych piece pairing book arts and large-scale papier-mâché sculpture.
Have Your Cake is a twenty-page concertina book developing on the idea of “eating your feelings.” Illustrated versions of store-bought cakes start out with standard messages like “Congratulations!” and gradually descend into madness as the author’s emotions become more repressed.
& Eat It Too is a 6-foot wide papier-mâché sculpture of a heart-shaped red velvet cake. The absurd scale and flat, prefab quality add to the tongue-in-cheek humor of it’s sister book Have Your Cake. Its armature is constructed out of recycled materials and the frosted appearance is all thanks to drywall compound.
When paired together, Have Your Cake & Eat It Too examines the tenuous dance between acceptable emotions and “condemnable” hysterics.