Abstract
Food art, and in particular margarine sculpting, is becoming a niche skill and art form. Food art has a long and rich history but is in decline because of changing food fashions and economic imperatives in the commercial food industry. The focus of this dissertation is to express, through sculpture, 30 years of the writer’s personal experiences as a margarine artist. Auto-ethnographical and heuristic methodologies are used to capture this unique perspective. The influence of liminality and the everyday–ness of the medium are two themes that have emerged in this study and which were used to guide the sculptural interpretation. This study contributes a rare insight into an understanding of the artist’s mind in relation to the marginal world of food art, particularly margarine sculpture.
