Food has moved from kitchen to gallery – and it’s never looked so good, writes Sue Williams.

There’s a fine art to preparing good food but food is also increasingly seen as an art form. A portrait of Nicole Kidman . . . in chocolate? A statue of burlesque artist Dita von Teese . . . in cheese? A grinning Buddha . . . in sponge cake?

Today, it seems artists are at work in every form of food. A sculpture of a hunting jaguar in margarine, an arrangement of spring flowers made of fruit, carrots delicately carved into an underwater scene, radishes into swans . . . the permutations are endless.

And if they look good enough to eat, it’s because they are.

“I remember once, a portrait of mine got damaged on a flight and a friend and I sat down in the airport and ate it,” says Sid Chidiac, a New York-based Sydneysider who paints chocolate portraits. “As we picked out the eyes to eat, then the ears, then the nose, there was such shock on the faces of other passengers.”

Anthea Leonard of Sweet Art, in Paddington, has been carving cake into handbags, model cars, statues and pretty much everything else since 1980, after majoring in sculpture at uni. Food art, she says, is becoming increasingly popular.

“I think that’s because it’s an easy medium to access,” she says.

Food art has also come to the fore in Britain, with the establishment of the Experimental Food Society. Showcasing a troupe of acclaimed British gourmet artists – with Chidiac its first Australian member – it demonstrates, according to founder Alexa Perrin, that “there’s more to life than just swallowing”.

She believes art and food have travelled hand-in-hand since early days, when Roman emperors held sumptuous feasts below portraits carved in vegetables and with elaborate sugar carvings decorating the table. “So I wanted to re-establish food as an art form today,” she says. “People are doing some amazing things and they’re slowly receiving more recognition, with some of our members showing at places like the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Modern.

“At our inaugural annual spectacular in September, members will be making their own installations to demonstrate their talents that will be eaten as part of the menu in the banquet that night. It’s very exciting.”

Two craftsmen from the London wax museum, Madame Tussauds, are experimenting with food-friendly moulds to create celebrities out of food, while current members include the jelly monger, Bompas & Parr. They love to sculpt famous London landmarks in jelly and, last year, memorably flooded a building with more than four tonnes of punch that visitors rafted over, then drank.

Another member is Food Is Art’s Prudence Staite, who makes sculptures from pizza dough, chocolate – her chocolate sofa, made from 250 kilograms of Galaxy chocolate, was tempting on so many levels – cheese (that’s her life-size Dita Von Cheese) and any other foods that lend themselves to her creations. She began after becoming frustrated by traditional art while doing her degree.

“I wanted art to be something that was interactive and stimulated all the senses, especially smell and taste,” she says. “With both food and art my two great passions, I did not want to do one without the other, so I began to combine them and make work directly with food.

“I want people to look at food in a very different way and at their relationship with food. This puts the magic back into food, makes it fun and something that should be celebrated and not taken for granted in this throwaway world.”

A former Dublin pastry chef, Paul Wayne Gregory, who studied chocolate under El Bulli’s former pastry chef, Oriol Balaguer, makes handcrafted chocolates into sculptures or speciality chocolates with unusual flavours such as rhubarb and cream and strawberry and balsamic vinegar.

A British photographer, Carl Warner, has moved into creating stunning landscapes made from food. At first glance, people think his “foodscapes” are pictures of real scenes. At second look, “the realisation that the scene is in fact made of food brings a smile and for me that’s the best part,” he says.

While other artists create landscapes out of vegetables, sliced meat products and even fish skins, many artists closer to home specialise in carving fruit and vegetables into striking tableaus. A trained Vietnamese cook, Thom Bui, who teaches both cooking and food-art carving in Sydney’s Cabramatta, says it’s a great outlet for creativity, as well as being enormously relaxing.

“Many people want to learn how to do it,” she says as she carves pumpkins, carrots, white radishes, cucumbers, watermelons and rockmelons into the shapes of dragons, dogs, cats, mice, cows and oriental flowers. “I just love it. It’s a hobby and I enjoy teaching it to others. It’s a big part of our culture.”

A Thai-Australian, Suchin Saroj, has also been carving vegetables and fruits into elaborate designs for more than 10 years for Sydney hotels and shops. “I learnt how to do it from my mother,” he says. “It’s very, very beautiful.”

The benefits of being involved in the industry are obvious, says Chidiac, who travels between bases in Sydney and New York and has shown his chocolate work in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Sydney and Kuwait, with his next major exhibition to be in Abu Dhabi in September.

His portraits of Kidman and Charlie Chaplin have been among his most popular and his The Last Supper, rendered in chocolate, and his current project, painting the history of the Phoenicians up to modern-day Lebanon, are both causing a stir. “You never have the chance to be the starving artist, as you can always lick your brushes,” laughs Chidiac, 41, who also hopes to be part of the Experimental Food Society spectacular in London in September and is planning a show in Sydney in January.

“You can always nibble on your paintings, too, if you get hungry, so there’s no excuse to stop working for lunch,” he says.

“Everything is 100 per cent edible and I only use the finest Belgian chocolate.”

He’s also hoping to set up a chocolate-art museum in New York, with a Belgian chocolate company offering him 20 tonnes of stock with which to begin.

He’d love to do the same thing in Sydney. “People love food art around the world and especially chocolate,” he says. “It’s a medium everyone can understand and love and, best of all, you can always eat it afterwards.”