Rosemary Cronin indulges her inner child by climbing into Joana Vasconcelos' giant ceramic wedding cake at Waddesdon Manor.
Do you remember the first artwork that captured your imagination when you were a child? I have a few, but a really vivid memory is seeing Karl Lagerfeld for Dior’s Piano Key cocktail dress in the Victoria & Albert Museum. I think I must have been eight years old, and every half term my mother would take me up to London and we would see things that would just fill my little heart and mind with delight. But that dress really made my imagination take flight… I imagined who might wear it, an elegant beautiful woman at the best party in Paris, drinking champagne and falling in love – I was eight years old remember! Young and naive I didn't realise that the dress has rarely been worn, and probably went straight from catwalk to the vitrine in the museum, or even worse storage.
Imagine then, if you can in this hyper virtual world, being taken as a child today to a 12-meter-tall, ceramic, wedding cake building that you can climb up! One made up of edible colours like pink blancmange, baby blue icing and yellow fondant, with fibre optics that light up at night! And this cake building of wonder is on a fairy-tale-like 1800s manor estate surrounded by forests, fountains and a rather spectacular aviary. Surely you would be captivated and spellbound, and in a feeling akin to a sugar rush – a little delirious ?!
Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has found in Lord Rothschild, in her own words, ‘someone who is as eccentric as me, and someone that can believe has high and wild as me’. Together over the last five years they have created ‘impossible dreams, impossible artworks – we all have them!’ and whilst they flippantly referred to Wedding Cake as a folly of follies, it actually feels like something far more special and magical than most people could dream of. Seeing them talk together was a beautiful moment, a friendship of two souls that have made magic together and have clearly found a solution to any problem that may have arisen in making this spectacular installation.
Waddesdon Manor with its treasure box of artwork, jewels and precious furniture pieces, with Wedding Cake has added : ‘a temple for people to be happy and to have a moment that they will never forget’. If you haven’t been to Waddesdon then I thoroughly recommend a summer sojourn to the estate to see both Wedding Cake and Mia Jackson’s curation of the Rothschild Treasury – a truly wondrous display of more than 300 objects made from rare and precious materials.
Rothschild and Vasconcelos’ triumphant partnership proves that fairy tales can come true, and are even available to the public to enjoy!
Rosemary Cronin
June 2023
Visit Joana Vasconcelos: Wedding Cake at Waddesdon Manor until 26 October 2023
Waddesdon Manor
Aylesbury
Buckinghamshire HP18 0JH
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