Jelly artist set to show bright ideas happen at any time

Jessica Mentis wants the world to know there's more to her art than jelly.

For three years, Mentis has been the "jellyologist" with a passion for architecture, food and art that has seen her create complex sculptures out of that most beloved of childhood desserts, jelly.

She's made dessert towers for events from swanky A-lister birthday parties to promotions for the SPCA — the latter involved making jelly for cats, complete with octopus tendrils and fish heads — while her jelly models of some of the world's most iconic buildings have appeared in global TV commercials.

But Mentis has temporarily put jelly on ice to contribute to a project to help grow New Zealand's creative community. She's one of 12 artists who selected a student artist to make work for the exhibition Moonlight. A shared project between specialist creative agency Raydar and The Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ), Moonlight recognises that creativity doesn't work to a fixed schedule.

Frequently, artists and craftspeople work a "day job" then pursue passion projects after-hours; moonlighting, in other words. Work to go on show, by the experienced as well as emerging artists, provides a snapshot of these after-hours ventures.

It's something Mentis relates to.

Her work with jelly began as a side project and shows just what can come from a little moonlighting. After university, Mentis spent a couple of years working in New York and London as a set designer and in hospitality. She says it was in New York that she first started seeing the links between food, art and theatricality.

Returning from her O.E., Mentis was finding her feet again when she signed up for the 100 Days Project on Instagram. Daily, she'd 3d print a jelly mould, set it with an experimental flavour, photograph the resulting jelly then post the image online.

Inspiration came from Bompas and Parr, UK food artists whose own architectural jellies and food events caught the public imagination. Mentis fed a similar fascination in New Zealand, with her photos shared pretty much as soon as she began posting them and enquiries about event catering following soon after.

"I would love to say I have a big passion for jelly — a favourite childhood memory — but, for me, it's about shaping it into an epic sculpture," she says, "but I do think there's something nostalgic about jelly and many people have an emotional response to it."

In her years of making jelly sculptures, Mentis has learned that gold gelatin sheets are best; you can concoct a range of flavours — Champagne Berry, Baileys, Hazelnut and Salted Caramel, and Gin and Elderflower — using juices and syrups. Mentis' favourite flavour is a chai jelly but she won't be in a hurry to make Bloody Mary jellies again saying that it just ends up tasting like a gelatinous pasta sauce.

While she's just taken possession of a new pop-up jelly bar and has another big project coming up, for Moonlight Mentis has returned to her love of spatial design and sophisticated pop-up books. She's drawn and hand-cut a series of other-worldly buildings like the kind she might see in books by her heroes, Russian paper architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin.

Lowdown
What: Moonlight
Where & when: Allpress Studio, July 3 — 13