Glass artist Shayna Leib , like anyone, is deeply attracted to the seductive pull of decadent desserts. Unlike most however, Leib is unable to indulge. Her body reacts to several aspects of puffed pastries and chocolate mouses, causing her to have many severe dietary restrictions. It was this void that pulled her towards the desire to work with the unattainable, to recreate the objects she couldn’t eat.
“No food is as powerful as dessert or gets as tied up in our issues of guilt, longing, abstinence, and attraction. We celebrate birthdays with it. Grandparents spoil children with it. It’s the first to get cut from a diet and the first some flock to for comfort. And yet for me, it represents the unattainable. I react to food with high histamine, salicylate, and copper content, and it results in very severe dietary restriction. This body of work started as a therapeutic exercise in deconstruction and a re-training of the mind to look at dessert as form rather than food. It soon became a technical riddle, and I became a food taxidermist of french pastries.
To glass, I combined my love of porcelain, realizing where one material floundered, the other excelled. This body of work utilizes nearly every possible technique in both mediums; glassblowing, hot-sculpting, lampwork, fusing, casting, and grinding in glass and well as the ceramic techniques of hand-building, throwing, and using a good old fashioned pastry tube.”
