A Kiwi artist has created a tasteful, and tasty, new World War I memorial – made of biscuits.
Kingsley Baird, designer of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Wellington, intends to build a memorial made of 18,000 Anzac biscuits at a museum in France next month.
These are not just any Anzacs. Baird has designed a series of cookie cutters to portray Kiwi, Aussie, French and German soldiers.
The idea may seem bizarre at first, but Baird, an associate professor of creative arts at Massey University in Wellington, said it was about the changing nature of memory.
“Memorials are often built out of stone and bronze, and with that comes a concept of memory lasting forever,” he said.
“But it doesn’t last forever.”
The memorial uses the biscuits to ask questions about how we remember the Anzacs and the other soldiers who died.
“It’s about the short-lived nature of memory.”
The sight of massed ranks of biscuit soldiers stacked in rows brings home the cost of the war. They are mass-produced, just as soldiers were churned out in World War I.
But each will be individual, just as each soldier was an individual. Some of the biscuits have limbs missing, to remember soldiers disabled in battle.
The artwork, named Tomb, is part of Baird’s stay as artist in residence at the Historial de la Grande Guerre museum in Peronne, northern France. It will be on show at the museum for eight months from April.
The biscuits will be baked in the run-up to Anzac Day by French bakers and the sculpture assembled by Baird over three weeks. It will take the shape of the Stone of Remembrance, designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens for Commonwealth war graves.
He will not use any glue or icing to hold the structure together, but said he was not worried about its stability.
“It’s always possible someone could lean on it, but it’s no different to any other fragile work of art.”
INGREDIENTS
The sculpture will use about:
120kg of plain flour
90kg of golden syrup
80kg of butter
70kg of sugar
50kg of oats
40kg of eggs
20kg of coconut
20kg of wholemeal flour
3kg of baking powder
It will cost about $6000. The biscuits will not be edible at the end of the exhibition.
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