FAKERY AT THE BAKERY!
It’s a mouthwatering selection, but look closer and you’ll spot it’s all naughty but knitted...
WHAT a smashing spread. It really does look mouthwateringly good enough to eat. But if you tried to tuck into this tempting array of cakes, doughnuts, loaves and bagels you’d be left feeling a bit of a nitwit. Or should that be knit-wit?
For the 1,000-plus goodies on display on this peculiarly impressive patisserie counter are in fact made of nothing more tasty than…wool.
Balls and balls and balls of it. So much that nearly 5st (30kg) of yarn was used by knitwear artist extraordinaire Kate Jenkins as she created her latest masterpiece over six months.
And what a feast for the eyes — if, sadly, not for the stomach — it has turned out to be. With cream and jam sponges topped with fresh fruit, tarts, macaroons, sourdough bread, seeded loaves, sausage rolls and Cornish pasties, she has made sure she has both the sweet and savoury ends of the spectrum well and truly, er, sewn up.
Miss Jenkins, 48, from Brighton, East Sussex, first got busy with her knitting needles and crochet hooks for the project — titled ‘Kate’s Bakes’ — in January last year.
By the time of its debut display at the Handmade Festival in Barcelona that May, it comprised about 500 ‘bakery’ items and since then it has grown in number as it has travelled elsewhere.
Kate said: ‘In Barcelona some people did actually think it was part of the food stalls.
‘They came up and couldn’t work out what it was at first, then did a double take and realised, “Oh, you can’t eat it, it’s fake food”.
‘I like the optical illusion and playing with people’s perceptions of art. It’s also been on display in a top-end shopping mall in Hong Kong and I hope to take it elsewhere round the world when I can.’
Kate fell in love with knitting as an eight-year-old growing up in the Rhymney Valley, South Wales. She trained as a fashion knitwear designer, graduating from the University of Brighton with a BA in fashion and textiles. But she soon branched out from clothing into witty depictions of food.
In 2007 in London, she staged her first exhibition, Comfort Food, for which she recreated a cafe. Since then her creations have included a crocheted dinner party and an entire fish counter. For the bakery, as well as knitting and crocheting, she used a few beads for poppy seeds on bagels and embroidery stitches to recreate the texture of crusty bread.
She also included a few jokes including a ‘cross-ant’ — a cross-looking croissant with an angry face; a French baguette in a stripy Breton top and beret; and a Cornish pasty dressed like a pirate with a beard.
Kate is already working on her next project — titled ‘The Art of Self Isola’tin’ and devised while in lockdown with her sister Helen Jenkins who is ‘a really good cook’.
‘The concept is to create art pieces from various tins which Helen uses the contents of to create tasty dishes,’ she said.
‘I then repurpose the tins so, for example, if we had a tin of sardines to eat, I knit four sardines and put them back in the tin and frame it. We hope to end up with a combined recipes and art book.’