This truly unique and fascinating collection of sculptures has caught my imagination.
It’s found in the temporary space of John B. Aird Gallery, housed in the Artscape building at 906 Queen W. during renovations of its home at MacDonald block.
Artist Adrienne Trent (pictured below) says, “the focus of installation work is not usually about sales, unless to a museum”.
Therefore she is able to project her mind’s eye without the yoke of commerciality. Hers is an honest exposé of “art for art’s sake”.
About 2 years ago, photos of Adrienne’s art was fed into an AI program. It came up with the image you see below. She decided to create an actual sculptural collection based on what she saw.
Below is the result. So, a reflection is added to the mirror of art imitating life and/or life imitating art : Art – imitating artificial intelligence imitating art imitating life that is possibly life imitating art, ad infinitum.
Adrienne created the sculptures using gesso plaster and old curtains from The Goodwill.
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When I asked Adrienne how she came up with the title “Burdens”; she replied that she was at home when asked, on the spot, for the working title. She looked around her home, and answered “Burdens”.
Although not raised in the house she bought as an adult, it had been in her family for 6 generations. This has kept her reticent to fully renovate the original heritage. That respect was a burden. The name stuck.
John B. Aird Gallery is one of the few avant garde galleries to show in Toronto. For me it was a breath of fresh air, after strolling through certain posh downtown galleries where there’s seemingly a second coming of Andy Warhol, and commercialized street art on canvas.
The collection of 4 at the rear of the room is sustainable art from an earlier show. I love this. Some of the items include:
An old used easel, baskets, snowshoe, baseball mitt, license plate, violin, muffin tin, plaster head, rusty can, broken chair, wheel of sorts and is that a paper cup?
The show runs until March 23, 2024. Go on a Saturday, and Adrienne will be there to talk with.
This delightful series of Children’s books teaches many things: kindness, community, acceptance, environment and more.
Resa – I believe the above is the first book in the series.
Robbie – It is the first book in the series. It was the first children’s book my publisher, TSL Publications, published too, so it was a learning curve for all of us.
Resa – On page 22 there’s a roaring fire. It looks delicious. What is it made out of?
Robbie – Ah yes, that fire was fun to make (and eat). The logs are made of a chocolate bar we get in South Africa called a Flake. It is quite crumbly and does look like it’s made of wood.
The fire is made from yellow buttercream piped using a large star nozzle and the earth is made from crushed, dark Oreos. Very delicious.
Resa – So, your son and husband are both named Michael!
(This is a bit embarrassing, but I thought Robbie wrote these books with her husband.)
Robbie – My husband’s name is Terence. Both my sons have Dean as a second name which is my father’s first name. It is a family name that has been passed down for a number of generations.
Resa – “Sir Chocolate and the sugar dough bees” is quite pertinent and important in my mind. Bees are so important to our survival. Did you and Michael do this tale as a teaching story?
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Robbie – Yes, all the books have a subtle teaching point about teamwork, friendship, acceptance or the environment. The Sugar Dough Bees and The Condensed Milk River are both about environmental issues and I have been pleased that lots of the children do pick up on them. It shows that the schools and their parents are giving them good guidance about our planet and looking after it.
Resa – Yes, last night I read “The Condensed Milk River”. It’s great that you feature environmental issues.
Resa – Your son was 10 when you wrote these books based on some of his ideas. That was in 2016. He must be 16 – 17 now. Does he still help with ideas?
Robbie – Michael is turned 17 on Monday, 30 January. He does still help with ideas for the stories, he has a wonderful imagination. Most of the Sir Chocolate books were written in 2014 and 2015 although I am only publishing some of them now.
I haven’t had to change them much as we still like the stories. My artwork has grown though and I’ve tackled more difficult projects like fondant dogs and a gingerbread caravan.
Michael assisted with a number of the ideas and themes for Haunted Halloween Holiday which we wrote and published last year.
He is very open minded and there is a strong theme of acceptance of difference in that book. A Vampire (Count Sugular) is married to a witch (Witch Honey) and their male baby is a banshee (I’ve only heard of female banshees before). I have been delighted to see child readers picking up on this and making remarks about a vampire married to a witch.
Resa – I see in “The Sugar Crystal Caves” that the recipes are not cooked or baked, but are created out of biscuits, wafers and other already made treats that are glued together with icing sugar.
This seems fun for younger children, that are not ready to bake, even with mom’s help. Is this what you intended?
Robbie – The instructions on how to make boats, cars, and other fun things from biscuits and icing was just an idea I had when I wrote that particular book. I had been remembering making sugar crystals and racing cars out of boudoir biscuits when I was a kid and I wanted to share that knowledge. I don’t think kids are shown how to do these sorts of activities any more and they are such fun. I did a few of these activities with my Sunday School class and they loved it. Biscuit art is an alternative to baking and is also a fun and bonding exercise for children and caregivers.
This particular book has done well with the pre-schools. I think the biscuit art is easier for teachers to do with their classes than baking.
Resa – I like the biscuit art. It’s like food LEGO. Kids get that.
What a great suggestion – biscuit art is like Lego. I didn’t think of it like that but your are right, it is all about construction.
Resa – In “Sir Chocolate and the Fondant Five”, you teach about African animals. It seems there is more to this than just teaching about animals. After all, they have to be saved from the lazy elves. What was your & Michael’s objective in this story?
Robbie – The objective of this particular book was partly to teach children about the “Big Five African Animals”, but it was also about teamwork and formulating a plan to solve a difficult problem. Sir Chocolate and the other animals all work together to find and rescue the Fondant Five. They derive a plan and implement it.
Resa – After I read “Sir Chocolate and the Ice Cream Fairies”, I thought….. Kindness and understanding bring personal rewards. Am I on the mark here?
Robbie –This little book had a few subtle themes. Obviously, colours was one, as well as different flavours and tastes and being adventurous about different taste combinations. Kindness and being helpful and thoughtful if people are sick are unable to attend to their jobs and needs for a period, was also a theme.
Resa – In “Chocolate Fudge Saves the Sugar Dog”, Sir Chocolate’s son is the hero. You teach about some dogs, but there is more. Tell me about the main lesson in this book!
Robbie – Chocolate Fudge is intended to be a good example to children. He is smiley, always polite to teachers, and does his work and achieves good marks. The dogs, on the other hand, are naughty and undisciplined. They chase the ducks and scare the frog. When Lord Humbug calls for the little dog who is struggling in the water, he doesn’t listen, but choses to carry on playing. As a result of his disobedience, he ends up in trouble and nearly drowning. Chocolate Fudge is brave and becomes a hero by saving the little dog.
I’ve also read “Haunted Halloween Holiday”. I reviewed it on my Hallowe’en post. Click on the book cover & go to that post. Scroll to near the end and find the review!
Diana from “Myths of the Mirror”blog reviewed Robbie’s new children’s Christmas story. Click on the above image, and go to the page of reviews. Diana writes the best book reviews!
Resa – I adore all of your fondant characters & cake castles & scenes etc. Personally, your fondant flowers blow my mind. Is the day lily on the shortbread in “the strawberry cream berries” a fondant or real flower?
Robbie – Yes, that flower is made from fondant. It is a wired flower which means that I run a narrow piece of florists wire through the base of each petal when I made them (each petal is made separately, of course). When they are dry, I then twist the wires together to form the flower. Wired flowers are challenging to make.
I modelled the pink one you referred to on a similar coloured flower in our garden. I love animals, birds, flowers and nature in all its shapes and forms. I usually study flowers, and other creatures for a few weeks before I attempt to model one. I like to get the small details right in each creation.
Resa – Robbie, I’m all into details. Thank you for patiently answering my many questions. It allowed me to write a detailed post on the marvellous creation of a son and his mother.
To learn about making fondant sculptures from Robbie, click on the cake above!
On top of everything there are recipes to go with the stories. Most are classic treats. Robbie shows us how to make Choc Chip Cookie & Choc Cupcakes.
The videos are edited by Gregory Cheadle, Michael’s brother older by 3 years.
Click on Robbie’s profile above, and go to her books on Amazon.
My words are in blue. Mike’s words are in black italics.
“Frenchie”sobriquet forthe French Resistance hero of this tale, is one kick ass martial arts fighter. She can kill a nazi in the blink of an eye. She uses guns, knives and her head. Her head has two uses; thinking and butting. Fearless, she will use her sexuality, in more ways than one.
Sex born of choice, no matter one’s sexual persuasion, is nobody’s business but theirs. Yet, when the ‘I own the world’ male of the species hold sway: women young, old and in-between beware! Those male scum bag’s brawn trumps feminine delicacy and brains. It’s been that way ever since poor Eve copped the blame for tempting a namby-pamby Adam in the supposed Eden. The Nazi’s history in that regard is a classic example of contemptible lowlife abusing the fairer sex at will.
Although fiction, the whole nazi thing is difficult to read about. However, after a slow start, Frenchie got to me. I had to know her next move.
I asked Mike a few questions, and in the end his answers serve better than any further review I could write. He provided two Leonard Cohen songs. The last question I ask, explains why.
1 – This tale is fiction set in the reality of World War II. We are predominantly in London and Paris. Where and/or how did you learn of: what London & Paris looked like, felt like and how people survived or died in those war years?
Born and bred in South London not that long after the end of the war, our two-up; two-down terraced hovel was on the opposite side of the main drag toward The Smoke. It scarred the already dubious, giant field of broken bricks, redesigned concrete slabs, shattered glass, bent pipes and later, dandelions by the millions. Oh yes, there were broken kettles, crushed teddy bears, lonely bed springs and crumpled shoes as well.
Prior to the bombing of said dubious field, it had housed many families most of whom died on impact. The view from my bedroom has never left me. It has a habit of creeping into both my dreams and nightmares. Because of this, its proximity to the city, its rebuilding of all things flattened and along with my day trips there, it has always had me imagining ‘what if I’d lived through that?’
As to Paris, I’ve visited more times than I can count. London I find bland and devoid of finesse. Not so The City of Love. It’s an ‘art versus science’ differential. The art of Paris always wins out insofar as I am concerned. What I know of Paris during the war was born of a combination of idle chat with its aging citizens and my research addiction.
To this day, given the choice and in the knowledge that the deadliest conflict in human history was shortly kicking-off, I would have no qualms about taking residence there.
The period twixt the two wars was, in Paris and particularly its bohemian district known as Montparnasse, a haven for free-thinkers and artists of all genres. They called it ‘The Crazy Years’…ask F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, to name but a tiny few.
2 – I first heard of the Nazis and the concentration camps as a child. I read “”The Diary of Ann Frank, when I was a young teen. Over the years movies and documentaries have added to my knowledge of the atrocities perpetrated.
Your story focuses in on certain detailed horrors the Nazis inflicted on young, pretty women that were not of the Aryan ilk. I am speaking of the women that were not sent to camps, but were kept for the Nazis own brutal form of enjoyment.
Where did you learn of these abominations?
‘People with dementia never lie’, so said the boss of the care home my father found himself in not long before his death aged 89. Fortuitously he only lost his mind in the last two years of his life.
The thing was, during his time in the ‘home’, he truthfully thought he was back in Stalag 8B POW camp near Kraków, Poland. Only a throw of a cricket ball away from the Auschwitz concentration camp, it doubled up as an extermination equivalent.
Aged 20 at the time, my father had been captured outside of Dunkerque when his lorry ran out of fuel. He’d spent the entire war banged up in said stalag. He never spoke of the war during his days of sanity. Come the madness he relived it. He saw the staff at the care home as armed guards, daily forcing him to dig for coal down the mines of Silesia, his ankles always tethered in chains. This initial talk of his, of such hideous happenings, is a mere example; there were many more like it.
I took his chatter to be gobbledygook. However, since then I’ve been able to verify such evil, as was inflicted upon his person.
What pray has that got to do with ‘women that were not sent to camps’? In terms of what’s stored inside my head, everything. Dad got to speak passable German. He and others sometimes got to chat with a friendly sentry, sometimes with the local Polish girls who handed out meagre rations. More often than not it was ‘cat meat’, not that he knew that at the time.
What the old boy told me regarding the treatment of women from conquered lands, be it under the knife of sicko doctors seeking to sterilize those not considered worthy of the ‘master-race’ at one extreme, rape by selection of the Nazi hierarchy or ‘a treat for the troops’ for no other reason than ‘we can’, was…well I’ve not a ‘word’ that gets even close to describing my father’s account.
However, he had inadvertently sent me on an eternal quest. Probing for verification through printed books, apposite telephone calls and via Google searches it was clear my father was not delivering a sick man’s exaggerations nor bonkers induced fibs. Quite the opposite. I’d rather say no more regarding those abominations we speak of. My book, fierce as some of its contents may be, doesn’t come close to what’s stored in the library of my mind.
I should add, to this day I have a printed pile of research far bigger than the book itself…a pile I’ll likely never read again.
3 – In your author’s opinion, what percentage of your tale is factual, what percentage is extrapolation and what percentage is complete fiction?
Cruel deeds taken by the Nazi’s as a matter of perverse motive ‘true’ in method only. Places, events and characters, all fiction based on fact. Basically, the whole of this book is entirely fictional, including the imagined actions of prominent WW2 leaders. Only the generality of well researched Nazi cruel habits, along with just the names and places of towns and cities in Europe and beyond are truthful. The bit I have to say on pain of death is ‘any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events within this book is wholly coincidental’.
4 – Chapter 15 opens with the telling of French actress Arletty, and her affair with a Nazi officer. It ends with a quote of hers. Is this factual?
‘Tis all factual. Ms Arletty was a charming girl who loved life. A French actress, singer, and fashion model, she was found guilty of treason for an affair with a German officer. I understand she served out her sentence in her own house. Good on her! Her quote when being interrogated by the French Forces of the Interior just after the war, says it all, ‘My heart is French, but my ass is international’
Chapter 15 was prompted by her unfair…to my mind…ridiculous treatment. She, like many other French girls, chose to have an affair with the enemy. I see no crime in that, and would lay odds that had it been the other way around the males of France wouldn’t have given a tuppenny toss. As mentioned earlier, “Sex born of choice, no matter one’s sexual persuasion, is nobody’s business but theirs.”..an irrelevance that somehow irked both the religious and the jealous into making it a crime.
In this regard, certain French men were as bad as Nazi’s. Post the war, male patriots were prone to take matters into their own hands. Across the country you’d chance upon girls hanging dead from the branch of a tree as punishment for frolicking with a German soldier. Mainly, their hostile foes would shave off the hair on their heads and march them through the town in front of an audience. Also, it was not uncommon for the accused to be stripped naked, and like the shaved head girls dragged through an angry mob, humiliated. Plainly, The Snow White Tigress would have none of this in her tale. Indeed, she made double sure such thugs got their comeuppance.
5 – As a matter of fact, chapter 13 opens with a report by Franz Mawick. Is this factual?
Franz Mawick, like Arletty, was genuine, his report also, his story heart-breaking.
6 – At the start of chapter 16, you quote 4 lines from “Suzanne”, by Leonard Cohen. Written 21 years after the war, it hasnothing to do with the war, yet it works for the story.
Why Leonard Cohen? Why not one of the many famous poets from the WWII years, Cecil Day-Lewis, Lewis Aragon, Ana Swir, etc.?
Well, Leonard Cohen was born in September of 1934, five years before the outbreak of war. He may have lived an ocean away, yet of Jewish heritage he would have been aware of the racism’s goings on. More importantly though, be it in song, as poetry or as a novel, his work is at its best when it’s reflective of life’s events. His song, ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’ is all about The Holocaust. Dipping deeper into his portfolio reveals another song, ‘The Partisan’where he speaks of the plight of the French Resistance…a subject integral to my book.
For me, the main thing is that this book has added more to; what should never be forgotten to be remembered. Did I like it? Yes, but No. I hope Mike and all take this as the compliment it’s meant to be.
You can download his albums starting at £5 GBP by visiting George’s Bandcamp site. Just click on the cover of his album “Devil’s Kiss”, (above) and you will find yourself there!
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