Soothing pastels – pale yellow, sugar pink, baby blue, sorbet orange and soft mint – are an obvious choice for grand Haute Couture creations, think classical gowns and voluminous opera coats of the kind we usually see at red carpet events, such as those in Giambattista Valli's S/S 23 collection.
Characterised by colours borrowed from sunny happy days at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, these gowns with trains and poufs, bows and swishing swirls of fabrics are designed to cater a ultra-wealthy clientele.
Elegant, but not desperately innovative, they ooze optimism and point at happy times, lavish parties, award ceremonies and gala nights, things that most of us, mere mortals, will never partake in.
But you don't need to go bankrupt to enjoy escapist pastel shades, there are indeed exhibitions featuring artworks that can reward us with some (literal) eye candy.
An example is "When Flowers Dream" by internationally-renowned Australian artist Tanya Schultz (AKA Pip & Pop), currently on at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens, London (open until 5th March 2023). Schultz is better known for her immersive colour saturated artworks employing sugar, candy, sweets, crystals and assorted playful craft materials such as modelling clay.
"When Flowers Dream" features imagined worlds that promise us a happy and endless food-utopia, a rich horn of plenty of sugary confections and a mythical landscape inspired by fairy tales featuring magical places of abundance such as the land of Cockaigne, a place with streets paved with pastries, houses built from cakes and mountains made of pudding.
A bespoke highly detailed installation developed in collaboration with Kew scientists explores the idea of a food utopia for the future: there are more than 7,000 known species of edible plants which we could be eating, and crop diversity is key to feeding the world's growing population.
New products – plant-based foods of the future including underutilised species such as Pandanus, Akkoub, Ensete, Baobab, Passiflora, Carissa macrocarpa, Dovyalis caffra, Dioscorea villosa and Morama bean – may save us from food scarcity as climate change impacts our environment.
Schultz sourced some of the actual fruits and seeds from various gardens around Australia and created moulds of them. She then cast them in different materials such as sugar, resin, silicone and plaster, and painted them in colours that gave them the appearance of being really edible.
Joyfully excessive, this confectionery indulgence and food fantasy about consumption and abundance is a visual feast of colour and sweetness, enticing, appealing and eliciting a sense of optimism with its eye-popping candy colours and sugary pastels.
But pastels can also be used for architectural projects linked with death: Bispebjerg Kirkegård (Bispebjerg Cemetery) in Copenhagen, built in 1903, features Instagrammable cherry trees that blossom in Spring at its entrance. But this pink show is not the only pastel tone you will spot in the graveyard. The cemetery features indeed a rather sui generis columbarium with finely shaped urns on display in chambers characterized by varying depths.
Designed by architect Holger Jacobsen and opened in 1920, the columbarium was very popular in the 1920s, as nearly 40 percent of those who were cremated in Copenhagen chose to have their ashes displayed in urns (popularity declined as the years passed and the two oldest columbaria were eventually closed).
The colorful rotunda remains the most popular urn chamber in the columbarium's only wing still in operation. Thousands of Copenhageners and tourists still visit it to see its unique pastel coloured walls.
Bispebjerg Cemetery is one of the architectural landmarks included in the programme of the Open House Copenhagen architectural event (25th – 26th March 2023). Developed in collaboration with the Danish Architecture Center, the event is part of the celebrations in honour of Copenhagen's official designation as World Capital of Architecture for 2023.
You think that a columbarium is not an optimistic place and can't therefore be compared to pastel Haute Couture gowns and fantasy foods? Well, a columbarium may not be an optimistic place, but a softer palette in graveyard design can instill a sense of calmness and peacefulness in the heavy hearts of those ones paying a visit here to the dear departed, providing them with a healthy dose of strength to get on in life.
Image credits for this post
Images 4 – 7 in this post courtesy of Kew Garden © Roger Wooldridge