sweet coincidence

Process
Eye-catchingly colourful pieces of candy moulded into shapes of all sorts. Sweet Coincidence started in a studio and shop specialised in the art of melting sugar and glucose to make candy that is carefully crafted into perfect lozenges, lollipops and other assorted forms. Normally discarded, one leftover piece was rescued every day and photographed in the studio. Over a period of one year, some 242 pieces were documented in this way. These leftovers are twisted and contorted into random, unintended, imperfect shapes. Yet it is precisely in their accidental form and colour that their uniqueness lies. These freakish remains are more than aborted experiments. They invite us to discover the beauty and promise hidden within.

Presentation
For the Sweet Coincidence exhibition, the year’s crop of candy creatures was edited down to a best-of-the-week collection of 52 highlights. Presented side by side on prints measuring 42 by 64 cm around the walls of the gallery, the works evoked all sorts of associations in the minds of viewers. Little encouragement was required to interact with the images, to see in them familiar objects like organisms of some sort, to read similarities between the forms, to imagine smaller series among the 52 images on display. ‘This looks like a…’ Visitors completed that sentence in countless different ways. And they became curators by selecting their own private collections and explaining their interpretations in a book on the way out.

Finale
Sweet Coincidence was not limited to the photographs alone, and involved visitors in selecting from among the images at the exhibition. But the project did ultimately reach a conclusion. For the finissage, the lumps of leftover candy that featured in the photographs, displayed in a heap in a corner of the gallery, were returned to their former fluid state and converted into a liqueur. Whereas candy-making involves melting sugar and glucose into a soft, molten mass that is then kneaded into shape, liqueur-making here involved crumbling the leftovers into small pieces and then melting them to form a syrupy, sweetened, alcoholic liquid. All those flamboyant colours and shapes that triggered our sense of sight had turned into a monochromatic mass that awakened our sense of touch, smell and taste. The journey from leftover to photograph to liqueur had ended. Waste had acquired value. Drink up!