A Decadent World Topiary Garden is a series of fictional images from my imaginary world rendered in sugar, brought into a visual reality through photography and sculpture. Inhabited by animals and animal/human creatures, the work examines hierarchal societal structures through the relationship between animals and humans.  I am perplexed by these relationships; their inherent power dynamics and the ways human cultures use, abuse, fear, love and revere animals. Divine beings from religious and mythological traditions depicted as having super human powers and human and animal attributes inspire my work. In A Decadent World Topiary Garden, bunnies are metaphors for humans, while the animal human hybrid creatures are deities and hold positions of power.

I sculpt with sugar to explore the hierarchal and transformative relationship between culture and nature; the power of culture to transform nature into symbols of decadence, frivolity, abundance and celebration. Sugar is a symbol of wealth and power; cultures owning the means of production hold economic power over cultures that produce it. Sculpting with ephemeral materials subject to deterioration, allows me to explore the relationship between the ephemeral object and the photograph.  Photographing the sculptures preserves them two dimensionally, offering the possibility of symbolic narrative through framing, juxtaposition, and composition. The hyper-realistic verisimilitude of the photographic image births my imaginary world into images of an imagined reality.