ARTWRITE #33: CAKE: THE UNNECESSARY NECESSITY
Laurie Simmons and Dana Sherwood
In Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing,” a couple endure the tragedy of their eight-year-old son dying after he’s hit by a car on his birthday. While dealing with grief and menacing phone calls from the baker about the unpaid birthday cake, the parents confront him, leading to a cathartic moment of connection:
They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.
The baker understands the necessity of his trade: to punctuate human celebrations and commemorations. Because he creates these moments for others but rarely experiences them himself, he’s keenly aware of how these rituals bring loved ones together and create memories.
My mother didn’t understand that the pleasure cake provides need not be limited to celebrations. In the photo, she’s smiling as she presents me with a cake from Sinclair Bakery, but I never saw cake—or any dessert—in our home outside of birthdays. Fearful of losing her figure, my mother simply didn’t trust herself to be surrounded by tempting foods.
I had to learn how to bake in other women’s kitchens. Once I got a taste for homemade cookies and cake, I began baking secretly—well, not exactly baking, as the smell would have alerted my mother. Instead, I hid bowls of batter in my closet. Sugar and secrecy, deprivation and transgression were just some of the building blocks of a lifetime of disordered eating.
Over time, I discovered how much I love making cakes—creaming butter and sugar until it makes that thwapping sound, watching egg whites go from foam to froth to peaks. Each familiar step makes me feel competent. I made my wedding cake, worked in a restaurant pastry department, and give myself permission to bake for family and friends any day of the year.
The inspiration for this issue came during a visit to Dana Sherwood's studio. The moment I saw a framed vintage cake illustration on her bulletin board, I knew I wanted to write about why cakes feature so prominently in Sherwood’s work. But I needed to find another artist who also works with cake. I remembered seeing Laurie Simmons’s petit fours photos hanging at The Pink House, a restaurant near me in West Cornwall, Connecticut, and was thrilled when she agreed to a Zoom interview.
Simmons’s cakes evoke women constrained by societal expectations; Sherwood’s cakes are talismans associated with heroines free to journey to imaginary worlds. Despite their differences, both artists understand what my mother couldn’t. As Simmons puts it: “We don’t need to eat desserts and cakes to survive … but psychologically, it’s so important to have pleasure.”
LAURIE SIMMONS
Throughout LAURIE SIMMONS’S career, a singular birthday cake has consistently resurfaced in her work. Other confections have also cropped up—countless cakes on a retro kitchen’s counters, cupcakes, donuts, charming petit fours, and hand-embellished AI-generated cakes—but a pink frosted birthday cake with its familiar inscription and lit candles has retained its essence for the past four decades.
The seminal birthday cake debuted in 1984 when Simmons was hired to produce fashion photos for a BAM Next Wave Festival catalogue. Eager to break away from the dolls that had characterized her earlier work, Simmons created “pretend” fashion shoots that would become her series Fake Fashion.
Simmons placed models in front of rear-screen-projected slides from her archives, sometimes clicking through as many as 50 backgrounds before settling on the one that worked best. Referencing the song from Funny Face, Simmons described how “the magic happened … It was like, ‘Think pink!’”
Because the cake is anomalous among the series’s interior and exterior settings, I wondered why Simmons included it. During our wide-ranging conversation, she explained its genesis.
Simmons’s father, an orthodontist and amateur photographer, not only took pictures while travelling but also bought slides from vendors at tourist attractions. Simmons discovered the purchased slide of a birthday cake among her father’s collection. “I was so intrigued,” she told me. “Why did my father have this birthday cake?”
The photograph is compelling because the soigné model appears disconnected from the out-of-scale cake looming behind her. She’s not facing it, not ready to blow out the candles; the juxtaposition allows us to see what she doesn’t: the candles capture the passage of time and her inevitable aging.
Why is Simmons so drawn to the image? “I don’t know what it was about this slide, the perfect pink and white birthday cake, the perfect candles, and it just became this sort of marker in time, this recurring theme… the psychology of children and birthdays—disappointment and regret—those are sort of underlying themes in all my work ... how symbolic birthdays are, what people project on them, how people reject them.”
When Simmons explained what drew her back to her father’s cake five years later, I thought about the role that serendipity plays in the artist’s process. While shooting in a ventriloquist’s home, Simmons noticed “the weirdest picture” on a wall—a matzah box on legs. That image triggered a memory of a life-sized pack of Old Gold cigarettes with human legs, dancing across a stage in an iconic commercial.
Soon after, while watching The Wiz, Simmons spotted a life-sized bellows camera with accordion-tubed legs during the Emerald City sequence. I need that camera, she thought. In 1987, the Museum of the Moving Image loaned it to Simmons, and her Walking and Lying Objects series was born.
A life-sized birthday cake presented a problem. At 5’ wide, estimates for frosting it to match the one in the slide were three to five thousand dollars. Even when Simmons was willing to switch from actual frosting to gesso, the cost remained prohibitive.
Forced to scale down, Simmons shifted to life-sized prints of miniature objects with “weeny teeny” legs. The limbs came from Japanese model kits, and the various poses let her create pairings to express each object’s personality. If the petit four suggests a flirty pin-up or showgirl beckoning attention, the birthday cake, with her straight legs and forward tilt, seems self-possessed and expectant.
In 2006, Simmons brought the birthday cake to life in “The Audition,” the third act of her mini-musical film, The Music of Regret. As a director shouts “Next!”, a tap-dancing house and other objects express their characters through varied styles of movement and music. When a ticking pocket watch anxiously peeks out from the wings, I rooted for him to get cast.
A lengthy close-up of pink toe shoes introduces the birthday cake, her dainty pointe work perfectly suited to her sweetness. Of course, she gets the part. As Simmons told me, “Everyone else is blown out of the water. And the poor pocket watch – we all know the feeling.” The watch—a literal embodiment of time whose movements speed up and then slow down—doesn’t stand a chance against the frilly cake, whose sweetness makes time’s passage more palatable.
Simmons’s birthday cake has evolved from a static image to a walking object to a ballet dancer; her AI-generated film Autofiction: Black and White features its latest incarnation. The short film is a condensed retrospective of Simmons’s 40-year career, and the birthday cake is naturally central to that celebration.
For the first time, Simmons pairs the cake with its inevitable song. As her avatar sings “Happy Birthday” in Simmons’s wistful voice, the cake multiplies on screen—first in black and white, then in color with glowing candles—making the passing years feel more pronounced than ever. When it’s time to extinguish the candles, one of Simmons’s early dolls comes to life to blow them out, completing the ritual for the first time in the cake’s history.
Simmons’s AI process is collaborative: she gives the tool a text-based prompt, then digitally alters the generated image in Photoshop and edits the film in Adobe Premiere. For still images, she further embellishes the prints with paint and other materials.
“There are questions about not only whether A.I. is photography, but whether it’s art at all,” Simmons acknowledges, yet she embraces the tool without qualms. “When I generate images, it looks like a picture I would’ve made. I feel like it’s just dipping into my subconscious and pulling out exactly the right stuff.” Technology is a gift that propels Simmons’s work just as the “silly” matzah with legs did decades earlier. As she puts it, “Artists have to be really open. I imagine wearing a tinfoil hat with an antenna; you just have to keep this certain channel open to influence.”
In the film’s coda, Simmons’s avatar returns, lip-syncing to Peggy Lee’s voice as she sings the refrain: “Is that all there is?” The candles have been extinguished, and just as the film appears to end on an existential note, Simmons flips our expectations by responding in her own voice: “Here’s the thing about autofiction. It doesn’t end. Until I do.”
DANA SHERWOOD
Eyes of Horus. Serpents. Pomegranates. And cake. When I first noticed these recurring motifs in DANA SHERWOOD’S paintings, sculptures, and videos, I couldn’t imagine how cake could match the power of such culturally significant symbols. But I was wrong. Sherwood weaves her cakes into fairy tale, mythological, and imaginary realms, imbuing them with unexpected meaning.
While Simmons’s standard birthday cake has a retro-American sensibility, Sherwood’s cakes recall architectural confections in the style of 19th-century European gâteaux — pyramids, swirls, or lady-finger-lined charlottes. These shapes and forms influence how Sherwood crafts her ceramics; when I look at her chalices and vases, the stacked components remind me of tiered cakes. For Sherwood, cake is sculpture first, food second.
Like Simmons, Sherwood recognizes that cake is both special and unnecessary: “When I paint food, it’s cakes. It’s not like a turkey dinner.” She loves cake’s fairy tale qualities and the power inherent in its presentation—especially when it’s on a decorative pedestal.
In fieldwork videos such as Feral Cakes, Sherwood creates nocturnal banquets to explore communication with animals. But she doesn’t just put out food—she develops cake recipes using animal-friendly ingredients and presents her confections in elaborately designed tableaux. For Sherwood, whether the recipient is animal or human, cake has special power: “There is a magic about cake, almost as though the ceremony of the cake creates a kind of liminal space of joy, laughter, and sometimes abandon.
In Sherwood’s paintings, cakes create moments that “take you out of ordinary time” and become portals to other realms. Just as Persephone becomes bound to the underworld the moment she eats six pomegranate seeds, the “EAT ME” currant cake enlarges a shrunken Alice so she can reach the key to Wonderland’s garden.
Sherwood views Persephone and Alice as underworld heroines whose stories capture descents with no light to guide them. “These young women must find their way through the darkness, using their own intuition and resourcefulness.” For Sherwood, they mirror the artist’s journey: they must become their own authority, charting a path when none exists.
In Sherwood’s equestrian paintings, cakes become symbols of feminine power. Women astride horses proudly present cakes on pedestals, evoking triumphant warriors returning from battle. These are Sherwood’s version of “the ubiquitous equestrian statue, in which cultures worldwide have celebrated the male domination over nature and civilization.” Rather than wielding a sword or carrying the head of a vanquished soldier, Sherwood’s heroines come bearing cake—a feminine symbol. By subverting the image of the conquering hero and portraying femininity itself as a source of strength, Sherwood offers her vision of a heroine’s journey.
A new series centering on cakes emerged while Sherwood was working on her nocturnal videos. She began to think about secretive eating and indulging when no one was watching: “Women are programmed to watch what and how they eat. The messages received are damaging, and it makes one appreciate the way wild animals offer an alternative that is more instinctual, a more intuitive way of being in the world.”
At the same time, Sherwood was “looking for a way to have a silent conversation, energetically, with horses.” This led her to ask: “What if I didn’t have a human mother? What if I had a horse mother?” As she began to imagine what it would mean to be nurtured inside a horse, her mind went to the “forbidden fruits of decadent desserts and confections and cakes that we don’t regularly allow ourselves to eat.” Here was my mother’s fear. Here were my bowls of batter hidden in the closet. Here, too, were alternative maternal figures creating a space for women to make peace with forbidden food.
Sherwood expanded the series to include the bellies of a range of animals. Naked with their hair flowing free, her women are at home in these womb-like spaces. Rather than proffering cakes, the women receive them. Sherwood explains why their journeys are now complete: “They recognize themselves as animals, as part of nature and belonging to the shadows and the chaos, seeing it as their home. When they learn to see in the dark, they find that, in fact, they are surrounded by cake.”
Great piece. Great connections. Really moving how you connected your personal experience with these artists. Further proof that we are all interconnected and can help heal each other.
This was a wonderful read, Maggie! Really thought-provoking! Loved it🎂💕