photos by Nicole Roegner

Move over, Willy Wonka – Mindy Sue Meyers has created An enticing world of sweets. Too bad none of it’s real.

For Mindy Sue Meyers, art started in the home economics classroom.
Meyers, 27, recently graduated from Arizona State University with a master’s in fine arts. She cooks up delightful treats made with the finest of ingredients: sponges, insulation foam, SOS pads, caulking and shellacking agents.
The baked goods look believably delicious.
“It started with the SOS pads,” she says. “I thought, ‘That is such a disgusting material and they rust so easily. But what if I could make them look really edible?’”
For her September thesis exhibit, Stitchalicious, Meyers sewed together hundreds of cupcakes, cookies, candies and cakes – all made from household objects. The exhibit is currently featured in Terminal 3 at Sky Harbor International Airport until May 25.
Meyers uses insulation foam to create perfectly peaked meringue. Caulking and spackling form pastel scoops of gelato. Layered felt and sponges, stitched together, create vibrant sponge cakes. She makes many trips to the hardware store.
“I really like that all of my objects come from really domestic places,” she says.
Meyers, who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, cites the vintage 1950s housewife aesthetic as the basis for her domestically inspired art.
Her color palette, filled with bright hues of pinks, greens and blues, mimics the Technicolor cookbooks of the ’50s and ’60s.
“The food in those cookbooks looks radioactive,” she says.