Invited guests at Karangahape Road’s Artspace Gallery were treated to much more than art at a private exhibition in Auckland that featured edible miniature road cones bursting with bespoke ice cream as part of a work.
Centrepiece at Artspace’s Cone Party was an “experimental form of edible artwork” by artists Giapo Grazioli and Billie Popovic from Giapo Haute Ice Cream.
Guests comprising Artspace benefactors, supporters and friends were invited to disassemble the work, removing the cones to have them filled with Giapo’s creation – a special Karangahape Road inspired cherry plum ice cream flavour.
The cones, made from orange tinted white chocolate, resembled the humble road markings commonly cursed as traffic beacons but often cherished as 3D bedroom art. The art was created in Giapo Haute Ice Cream’s Queen Street kitchen and ice cream store.
According to Giapo the artwork represented the “intersection between street art and edible art”, and that one of the key ideas behind the piece was change. “Karangahape Road is a place of change at the moment – both in a physical and a social sense. We wanted to capture that turbulence and used the safety aesthetic of road cones to help to represent that,” he said.
Giapo says the artwork was also a something of a shrine to the hot summer of 2014/2015. “Ice cream is so much a part of the Kiwi summer and we wanted to engage people with the creativity that can accompany food.”
Giapo and Popovic have been collaborating since 2014 after Popovic graduated in 2012 from University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. Popovic’s speciality is the crossover between art, object and product design.
