Cotton's paintings are comprised of all manner of cakes, candy, and ice cream and are often inhabited by tightly rendered pin-up models. Cotton is widely known for art directing Katy Perry's California Gurls music video, in which the pop star cavorts through a three-dimensional wonderland of Cotton's two-dimensional fantasies. But the video was not Cotton's first foray into sculpture. In 2008, four years prior, he made a collection of elaborate plaster cakes. They seemed to bear the marks of rough handling, with finger smears and crushed edges. Cast from silicone molds made from real cakes, the plaster sculptures present a playful irony: confections with a short shelf life rendered in an exceedingly permanent format. From plaster to polystyrene, acrylic polymer, pigment, and gypsum, the artist employed a number of materials to enshrine the otherwise transient cake-life. Cotton sees cake decoration as a form of architectural ornamentation, so casting the cakes in plaster was a natural choice. Plaster gave Cotton minute detail and precision, but he still wanted to find a sculpture medium that truly had the look and feel of cake and icing. Ruth Lingen and Akemi Martin of Pace Paper suggested casting pigmented paper pulp, and Cotton agreed to give it a try. Cotton began his cast-paper work in 2013, with six unique sculptures constructed of forty-three separately cast cakes. The sculptures were titled after the Greek muses—Calliope, Erato, Urania, Clio, Thalia, and Polyhymnia. All cakes were formed using four silicone molds and five Teflon-coated cake pans. A set of each cake shape was made in three color groups: pink, yellow, and green; and each color was pigmented in two or three different tones. Cotton instructed Lingen and Martin to pigment lightly and to keep the frosting Will Cotton: Pastry in Paper Pulp rachel gladfelter Calliope, 2013, 28 x 13 x 13 inches, cast cotton pulp, pigment. above: Detail of Calliope. All photos courtesy of the artist and Pace Prints, New York. summer 2015 - 7 flavors in mind as they worked. Pink was "strawberry," dull green was "pistachio," yellow green was "key lime," and pale yellow was "buttercream." It was important that no two cakes be exactly alike, so a chart was made to track different color combinations during the casting process. To create the molds, Cotton baked edible (carb-heavy) maquettes in his studio kitchen. Each real cake was decorated using an eggwhite icing (resembling a meringue) which hardened enough after a few days to be used as a positive cast for a silicone rubber mold. Emily Chaplain did all the paper-pulp casting for Pace Paper, which required a dedicated focus. In his first series, Cotton used pigmented pulp for the walls and top of the cake with white paper pulp with calcium carbonate for the decorative piping. Because the white ornamental piping is in higher relief, it was cast first into the mold, followed by the pigmented pulp for the top and sides. As an example, for a white-on-pink combination, Chaplain partially drained water from white-pigmented pulp, then carefully but firmly packed the pulp into the corners and edges of the decorative elements. She placed and sponged each layer of pulp, being careful not to over-sponge which could actually cause the pulp to detach from the structure. After casting all of the ornamental piping, Chaplain then switched to the pink-pigmented cotton pulp to form the body of the cake. Except for the occasional finger smear or groove added by the artist, these areas of the mold were even, like layers of fondant. As any papermaker knows, creating the illusion of buttery smoothness requires technical prowess. To produce a consistent surface, Chaplain found it best to begin with the "bottom" center (eventually the top of the cake) and work her way out and up the sides of the mold, building layer after layer of lightly hand-pressed pulp. Due to the simple realities of gravity, Chaplain packed the pulp slightly thicker toward the bottom of the mold, in order to help the pulp stay attached to the sleek mold surface towards the top of the inverted cake shape. This strategy also helped ensure that the form would support itself while drying. After all the pulp was cast in the mold and excess water sponged out by hand, the cakes took about a week to dry, and then were taken out of their molds. Depending on the complexity of the mold and the number of undercuts, the cake could either be easily popped out or would require two or more people to pry the silicone mold away from the cast form without incurring breakage. Once the casts were free, flat cotton-paper bases were pigmented to match the cake walls, attached with Jade glue to the bottoms, and lovingly trimmed to be seamless and convincing. With all of the paper-pulp cakes surrounding him, Cotton spent days stacking and restacking the hollow forms to achieve the desired compositions. Lastly, the artist attached the cakes, one atop another using a white acrylic gel medium applied with an icing bag, much like a baker seaming his confections. After the successes of the first paper-pulp sculptures, Cotton and Pace Prints decided to do a second project entitled the Pleasure Principle series. This time around, two larger rubber molds were added to the mix along with an expanded color palette. The main flavors for this series were strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, and lilac. Each was rendered in several combinations, as pigmenting was added to both the base cake and the piping pulp this time around. With more colors, more sizes, and more possible combinations, the new smooshed and stacked compositions are even more dynamic than the first set of paper cake sculptures. Cotton claims that his cast paper cakes have the most material similarity to his original baked goods. "The matte paper pulp absorbs light like actual buttercream frosting does." Cotton continued, "I love the way the fluffy cotton evokes the texture of a good, light layer cake." The paper cakes have the added bonus of being lightweight, allowing for more varied stacking compared to the plaster versions which could potentially break under their own weight. Papermaking has many similarities to baking: there are certain recipes to be followed, exact timing of beating or baking is important, and a degree of blind faith is necessary when waiting for the ingredients to set. There are also variables like humidity, drying conditions, shrinkage, and color change that can affect the outcome. Cotton enjoys this correlation; and he says that part of the fun of working on these projects in collaboration is that he can leave the technical details to professional papermakers while he is free to focus on his "baking."
