Above the trees and rosebushes at Buckinghamshire’s very grand Waddesdon Manor, the buttery-yellow frosted tips of the top tier of a wedding cake peek across the grounds.
This is not the start of a fairytale, but the very real (if slightly surreal) experience of approaching Wedding Cake, a new sculpture by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos that’s taken root in the grounds of Waddesdon. As you get closer, the full scale of the piece comes into view. Nearly 40 feet of handmade Portuguese tiles make up a three-tier ceramic wedding cake that sits inexplicably on the estate of one of the UK’s grandest country manors.
Joana, who made headlines earlier this year with her dreamlike set for Dior’s show at Paris Fashion Week, describes Wedding Cake as a folly: a building constructed purely for the joy of it, to exist in grand gardens or open spaces simply for decoration. But that’s not quite right; Wedding Cake will have a profound function as a space for real-life weddings—making it a dolls’ nest of meta-ceremonial significance.
Gone are the days when weddings occurred in either a church or a registry office. You can get married in castles, at Italian vineyards, and on beaches. But this unique new venue snuggled into the English countryside, might just be the quirkiest space to tie the knot right now.
Joana didn’t always intend for Wedding Cake to be used in such an on-the-nose way. Describing it as her “impossible project” when we sat down together a couple of days before the sculpture was due to be finished, she told me how long she had dreamed of creating it.
“I’ve always worked with the idea of marriage being a transformative moment for people’s lives,” she said. Her first major sculpture debuted in 2005 at Venice Biennale—A Novia (The Bride) was a chandelier made of over 14,000 tampons. Later she created Solitaire, a wedding ring from car alloy wheels that is now on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Wedding Cake rounds out the trifecta of wedding symbolism Joana has played with for almost 20 years. The tricky part was finding someone to commission the project.
