Just like any cake decorator would, Montreal-based artist Shelley Miller uses sugar icing to create delicate patterns of lines, shapes, and flowers. The one main difference with Miller, though, is that she's not baking cakes. Miller is an installation artist who creates many of her intricate artworks outside. She uses edible blue paint on white sugar tiles, and then affixes the tiles on to the walls with icing.
In much of her art, Miller explores the unpredictable impermanence of objects in relation to time, weather, and historical authenticity. By sculpting in public, outdoor spaces, her installations could last for hours, days, or weeks. Some may last for months while others could just as easily wash away in the rain the very same day they are made.
As each outdoor sculpture decays over time and the pieces begin to fade away, her work directly investigates memory and history. Miller's project is described as a “retelling of history, and an exploration into how juxtaposed and/or omitted images can greatly modify interpretation, not unlike the construction and destruction of memory and history itself.”
