AS TOLD TO A HOST of POSSIBILITIES

Culinary artist LAILA GOHAR creates COMPLEX INSTALLATIONS that LOOK as good as they TASTE. But when she CELEBRATES with family and friends, she likes to keep it SIMPLE.

I've never really celebrated traditional holidays, like Christmas or my birthday. For me, it always felt much more exciting to market. This comes from my parents: We celebrated the holidays growing up, but they never placed a ton of emphasis on them. I'm the same way now with my son, who was born this past May.

Still, entertaining is my way of life. It's how I connect with the people I love. Making food is an obvious way of expressing your appreciation and gratitude for others. It's also what I do professionally; I create installations out of food in traditionally nonfood spaces like galleries and museums and in partnership with fashion brands for events. There's so much opportunity with these kinds of experiences because you can really create a world and invite people into it. Last year, I made life-size chairs out of cake for the opening of an art show at Sotheby's in Paris.

I work a lot with the designer Simone Rocha; we have a similar sensibility even though our mediums are different. But more and more, I'm interested in doing installation-based work that's not necessarily for a commercial purpose. This year, I made this piece called Baby Bread Bed for a group show at MoMu, the fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium. It was a blanket constructed from pieces of bread that were stitched together and was symbolic of a mother's primal desire to keep her child warm and protected. I feel a huge sense of responsibility for what we leave behind on this earth; the thing about my work is that it is ephemeral, so it's not going to exist forever.