Shayna Leib is a modern multimedia artist with an amazing sense of material. Her works, made of glass are the best evidence of this. Shine Leib was educated at the Polytechnic University of California in San Luis Obispo, where she studied philosophy, literature, visual arts and music. She was supposed to defend her doctorate in philosophy, but instead went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began to study sculpture with glass and metal. Working with glass, Shine Leib paid maximum attention to the study of the properties of this unique-beautiful material.
She 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.
“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,” says Leib in an artist statement about her series Patisserie. “It soon became a technical riddle, and I became a food taxidermist of french pastries.”
Glass for all its fragility and beauty is a very difficult material for work. Working with it requires tremendous stress, attention, and knowledge of the many technical characteristics of this material. The creation of only a small part of such a composition may take more than a month of painstaking work. To create the glossy sculptures she combines elements of porcelain and glass, utilizing nearly every technique for both to achieve the hyperrealistic quality of each faux dessert. Like a typical French pastry would be rolled, glazed, baked, and trimmed, Leib hot-sculpts, fuses, casts, grinds, throws, and even pipes with a theme-appropriate pastry tube. You can view more of her sweet imitations on her website, Instagram, and Facebook.
