With Plates Shrinking and Diet Culture on the Rise, Arielle Tesoriero’s ‘Cake Girls’ Force Viewers to Confront Our Insatiable Appetite for Women’s Bodies
Interview with i-candy founder + co-eic: Emmursss (Emma Rose Rowell) | Photos by: McKale GoodwinI’m not a girl, not yet a cake… or am I? NY-based visual artist Arielle Tesoriero makes cake girls, but her work itself argues that a cake girl isn’t made, but something that happens due to memory, time, and trauma. Arielle takes i-candy behind the scenes on her inspirations for the decadent and decaying sculptures, her Frankenstein-esque process in bringing them to life, and what her work says about society’s taste for women’s suffering.
When Arielle put on her artist apron and got to baking for the first time, she didn’t know that what would come out of the oven of her creativity was a frosting-coated, anguished-laden girl made of cake. Her first perception of the creature she had brought to life was that it was some kind of trophy, a marker that her childhood naivety had finally been defeated by her adult realism. But as she continued to make the sugary sweet sculptures, the lines between what was real and what was cake began to blur. Her pieces began to reflect how expectation, desire, and memory accumulate and transform over time, only to be created and destroyed again and again. The cake girls explore the uncomfortable, the hyperfeminine, the playful, and the grotesque, and through her surreal compositions, Arielle represents selfhood as something inherently unstable.
I’d love for you to tell our readers more about you, when you started your creative journey, and some of your inspirations growing up.
I started painting when I was 12 because this boy at my school had an ex-girlfriend who was a painter. I thought if I could paint too he would like me. So I took a bunch of my moms old house paint and ripped up a cardboard box and I made a portrait of a girl who had daisies over her eyes. Reciting this now, it feels like Taylor Swift could have written a song about me. But in all seriousness, even though at the time I didn’t understand what I was doing, I was painting myself. I was already learning to understand myself through an external gaze. I was asking, consciously or not, what do I need to become in order to be wanted? And in the end, me and that boy never talked again, but I decided to keep painting because I found meaning in trying to understand myself. And for the record, I love Taylor Swift.
Your work explores a connection between the feminine body and food, and the way the two have been associated throughout culture and art history. What are some pieces of media that have inspired you that maybe explore this notion?
This year I have been really inspired by The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, which I had never heard of before people started commenting on my videos. It’s crazy the parallels that are between my ideas and a book that was written in 1969. I’ve also become interested in exploring Betty Crocker cake and frosting books from the 60s and 70s, and trying to learn more about cake history.
A wonderful friend of mine, KC HySmith, is a food scholar who specializes in cakes and I have found her writing to be incredibly inspiring. If you like my work you should check her out. A few of my other favorites are All Flesh by Ananda Devi and Daisies by Vera Chytilova. Both have given me different ways of thinking about the body, appetite, femininity, excess, and the strange relationship between attraction and discomfort.
You’ve noted that cake became a central image in your work as a symbol of ‘reward, display, and curated perfection,’ can you expand upon why you gravitated towards the dessert as such a defining part of your work?
It’s funny because I don’t really like cake as a dessert, I would much rather have a cookie or ice cream. But I do love the aesthetic of cake which was the initial reason I started exploring how I could reimagine it. Cake has many different meanings attached to it. It’s associated with rituals, celebrations, memory, childhood, nostalgia, and perfection. I never imagined there would be a point where I was only making sculptures of cakes. This work has unfolded gradually over the past five years, and I’ve only been making my cake girl series consistently for about a year now. I’ve found it’s an incredibly rich idea to explore, and I never feel bored with it. I’m always asking myself new questions to challenge myself. Where does the body end and the object begin? What does it feel like to be looked at? What happens when the thing you constructed to make yourself desirable becomes the thing that consumes you? I’m not looking to answer these questions definitively, I use them to help me explore different directions the work can go.
Your work engages with our larger societal fascination with women’s bodies: sexualizing them, policing them, abusing them, and of course does so amidst a particular rise in diet culture and disordered eating. I’m curious the range of responses you tend to get to your work, and how your own perceptions of your sculptures have possibly changed with time?
Sometimes people don’t like my work because it reminds them of dead bodies. Recently people keep bringing up “Neil Patrick Harris Amy Winehouse Cake” which I had to google. In 2011 at a Halloween Party, Neil served Amy’s body as a cake/meat platter shortly after she died and it understandably caused controversy. I have talked many times about how I don’t mind when people don’t understand my work or just plainly don’t like it, or make comparisons to things I don’t know about. That’s part of being an artist. On the flip side, the support I’ve gotten for my work this year has definitely outweighed the negative and it has made me feel very grateful. I get comments like, “oh my god, I’m a cake girl,” “they take and take and take…she gives and gives and gives,” and “it feels like seeing Laura Palmer’s body for the first time.” I have found an audience online who gets me. And my own relationship with my cake girls is always changing. The more I make them, the more I understand them, but I also think the more complicated they become. I don’t always know exactly what they mean when I start making them, and I don’t think they have one fixed meaning once they exist. My relationship with them continues to change as the work develops, and I think that uncertainty is part of what keeps me interested in making them.
Three of your cake girl sculptures are being shown in the Untitled Space’s exhibition titled, ‘DREAM’ running September 21st - October 3rd. Can you walk us through some more details on each piece, where you’re sourcing materials, your process, and any other insights?
Most of my work is made with styrofoam that I dig out of the NYC Marriage Bureau’s garbage, which may or may not be legal. The connection feels pretty uncanny, but the main reason I get it from there is because they use clear garbage bags, so I don’t have to dig as hard. Teen Miss Promtasia is a portrait of my youngest sister, Sophia. I was thinking about creating an immortal beauty queen because I never got to go to prom. That piece is special to me because people say we look like twins and I feel we are the most alike out of all my siblings. Party Trick and Smoke Break are both of my friend Violetta. I was thinking of how I could portray a figure destroying themselves. They are sort of like two different versions of the same psychological state. The candle is important in both works but it operates differently in each. In Smoke Break, the candle represents a wish or a dream. In Party Trick, it represents the aftermath of giving up, because the candles have completely destroyed the figure and half of her body is gone. I think the candles in my recent work have become just as important as the cake itself.
‘party trick’
Do you have a favorite coffee order or local cafe / ice cream spot for our New York readers to check out?
Everyone is always surprised when I say I don’t drink coffee and never have. I just don’t like the taste of it. I don’t like coffee, I don’t like cake. I know, what’s with me? But I have the biggest sweet tooth and some of my favorite bakeries are Billy’s Bakery and Grandaisy in TriBeCa. I work near there so I’m always looking to get myself a sweet treat. At Billy’s, my favorite is the peanut butter chocolate bar, and at Grandaisy, I love the chocolate panino dolce. In my neighborhood, I love T-Swirl which makes Japanese crepes, especially the chocolate banana one with vanilla ice cream. I love chocolate.
Is there anything more you’d like the i-candies to know about you and your work?
I’m so excited to announce that I’m collaborating with Gallery by Flo on a limited edition perfume inspired by my sculpture Party Trick. I think this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to be able to say, “yeah, I smell like a cake girl.” I will be sharing more details within the coming months so be on the lookout!
—
Thank you so much for reading <3 Keep up with Arielle and her work via her Instagram and Website. Three of Arielle’s sculptures is being shown in the Untitled Space’s upcoming exhibition, ‘DREAM’ running September 21st - October 3rd, 2026 with a reception on Friday, September 25th, 5-9 pm (RSVP required).