Caramel Planks Gay Outlaw was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1959. She lives and works in San Francisco, where she has been exhibiting her sculpture since the early 1990s.
The art for which she is best known has been made of food, especially pastry, not treated decoratively, but used for its properties and its materiality.
Puff Supports She makes shapes of translucent caramel, for example, and sometimes the caramel melts onto the floor at the exhibition progresses.
A sculpture called “Puff Supports” consisted of stacks of puff pastry leaning against the wall at an angle, like a row of 2 x 4’s.
Outlaw studied at the La Varenne cooking school in Paris, and later at the International Center for Photography in New York City.
Dark Matter She began using pastry as an art medium after she had been working with photography for a while and wanted to move into sculpture.
Pastry was familiar to her, but resistant, so it gave her the opportunity to learn about construction problems.
Also, as a temporary medium, it allowed her to work large-scale with nothing to store.
Black Hose Mountain Her recent work is made of more substantial materials.
She built a room-size sculpture called “Black Hose Mountain” (now in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum of the University of California) by filling lengths of black garden hose with white plaster, then cutting them into small angled pieces and painstakingly assembling them.
Untitled Other works are cubes of various common materials drilled on diagonal lines to create alternating voids and units.
Outlaw’s work always has a formal underpinning, but her formality has a light touch.
She has a deadpan way of moving ahead that causes each work to seem self-contained, not an inevitable next step from the last.
Each new work is a new exploration for her, a trial, or—as the name of her new print series suggests—a “trial pattern”.
Untitled This series is based on pictures from “Brassey’s Book of Camouflage”.
She used the same plates for earth and sky. She used layering and patterning, but not repetitively.
The prints subtitled “Sky” and “Sunset” are concerned with a camouflage concept called “dazzle” in which the eye is confused by glittery, airy activity.