Art Form - In Knead Of Some Imagination

As children, we were all told not to play with our food; Lisa Clayton not only played around with her bread, one of the most mundane of foods, but also went on to create the most astonishing, unique and decorative range of sourdough breads.

Is there a connection between bread and art? Not really! In fact, to a layman there is no clear relationship between the two but this does not apply to the ample vision of an artist who sees the scope to be creative in almost everything. In fact, bread and art appealed so greatly to the biologist Lisa Clayton that it brought out the artist in her.

Marrying both the creative and culinary fields together, she has given the lowly loaf a whole new look making it much more than the sum of its simple parts. Lisa Clayton’s sourdough breads enchant you to a level where you want to just keep looking at them rather than cut them and eat them up.

It was only around two years ago that artist Lisa Clayton first made art out of the sourdough bread that she had prepared at home and today if we were to classify her as an experimental baker, the description would not be wrong altogether. Bread, more often than not, connects people and cultures. Clayton’s loaves inherently capture this association from a conceptual as well as an aesthetic standpoint.

Bread ‘scoring’ - the art and craft of slashing a ball of dough with a sharp blade or ‘lame’, before placing it in the oven, influencing how it will expand and crack in its final form, is a classic baking technique. It also happens to be a method that with a little finesse can produce some really ornamental loaves.