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Can food be art?
Prudence Emma Staite certainly thinks so - she's launching a gallery dedicated
to her chocolate portraits and sculptures. "I
have worked with other foods," she says, "but chocolate is something
that everybody has some kind of relationship with from an early age, it's universal."
Her
initial experiments with edible art brought mixed results. "When
I was working with cheese and bacon it was a bit more grotesque
... it was quite disturbing," say Prudence Emma.
"Chocolate
has got so many connotations to it," she continues. "Some people view
it as sinful but I only use the really good stuff. "I'm
very much into promoting that and letting people know that chocolate is very good
for you as long as you're eating the right stuff."
Yum Of
course, working with the sweet brown stuff has certain occupational hazards. "I
do consume quite a lot through actually making my work," says Prudence Emma,
"I'm always melting, sculpting (and) I chisel it with my teeth"  I'd like to do a life-size Nelson's Column...
 | | Prudence
Emma Staite |
Her
oeuvre includes portraits and painstaking casts of various (sometimes
rather personal) parts of the human anatomy.
"I
tend to cast my own body but I can do anybody's," she says.
"I paint latex on in layers ... it's fine to eat, it's safe.
"I
like the idea that you can eat anything and doing the body parts
it's kind of like hinting at cannibalism ... and a lot of stuff
which I can't really go into at the moment!"
 | | A
selection of chocol-art |
Glucose
She's
even found a way to fashion heatproof chocolate jewellery.
"I
make the chocolate into a paste with glucose, it doesn't melt unless it gets really
really hot. Prudence
Emma is launching a studio near Tewkesbury on the 30th of may, which will serve
as an invitation-only showcase for her work.
But her chocol-art ambitions
don't stop there: "I'd like to do a life-size Nelson's Column next to the
real thing, and a two-storey house made out of chocolate!" 
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Most
artists would be very cross if you ate their work, but not Prudence
Emma Staite. She makes portraits and sculptures from chocolate.
