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“It’s difficult to find somebody who can dream at the same level that you do,” says Joana Vasconcelos. Known for her playful monumental sculpture, laden with messages about love, femininity, and domesticity, the Lisbon-based artist’s oeuvre spans art, design, and fashion—her fabric sculpture installation recently formed an otherworldly backdrop for Christian Dior’s fall 2023 ready-to-wear collection.
In this instance, the “dream” is what she calls her “impossible project”—a towering interactive wedding cake entirely swathed in Portuguese ceramics—which has recently been installed at Waddesdon Manor, the 19th-century estate bequeathed to the UK’s National Trust in 1957 and managed by the Rothschild Foundation.
Luckily when it comes to dreaming big, Vasconcelos found a kindred spirit in Lord Jacob Rothschild—“Lord R,” as he is affectionately known—with whom she has previously collaborated. Bringing the 12-meter-high, three-tiered Wedding Cake to life would require engineering feats to withstand outdoor weather conditions and meet Vasconcelos’s exacting standards. “The project needed someone brave, someone who possesses the art knowledge and life experience that Lord R has.”
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Opening to the public for tours from June 18 through October 26 and then permanent view onward, Wedding Cake is situated near Waddesdon’s charming ornamental Dairy, built in 1885 for the house’s original owner’s dairy herd (and later his legendary parties). The work reflects the Rothschild family’s enduring art-collecting legacy and patronage, revered for its 18th-century porcelain and furniture as much as its Dutch Old Masters and cutting-edge contemporary sculpture. As a marvelous structure amidst the landscape, Wedding Cake also echoes the centuries-old tradition of the garden folly designed to surprise and delight visitors (think intriguing pavilions and structures, like Central Park’s Belvedere Castle or the Great Pagoda at London’s Kew Gardens). It joins Lord R’s garden-set sculptures, which include a futuristic red horse-drawn carriage by French contemporary artist Xavier Veilhan.
Steps away from Wedding Cake is Vasconcelos’s Lafite, two candlestick-shaped sculptures composed of illuminated Chateau Lafite Rothschild magnum bottles, which the Rothschild Foundation commissioned in 2015 as an homage to the family’s Bordeaux wine estate. In 2012, Vasconcelos’s Pavillon de Thé teapot was featured in a contemporary sculpture exhibition in partnership with Christie’s at Waddesdon Manor, and her work was displayed on site again in 2016. Nearly five years in the making, Wedding Cake is easily her largest and most ambitious project to date; its significance is multilayered, literally and figuratively.
The work concludes a larger project that Vasconcelos has been developing over the last two decades, which explores a woman’s transition into marriage through classic bridal symbols. At the 2005 Venice Biennale, which won her worldwide acclaim, she debuted The Bride, a chandelier-shaped sculpture composed of thousands of tampons. Thirteen years later, her larger-than-life engagement ring— Solitaire, constructed of luxury-car wheel rims and glass whisky tumblers—was shown in her solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Given that Waddesdon Manor is also a popular wedding destination, Vasconcelos calls it “the perfect match” for her series’ culmination.
The artwork’s predominant material—ceramic—further ties Vasconcelos’s own Portuguese heritage to the manor’s. “Waddesdon’s ceramic collection is to die for. I never thought of being a part of a ceramic collection like this one,” says the artist, whose Wedding Cake also took visual cues from iconic motifs featured in rare pieces by Sèvres and Meissen in the manor’s permanent collection. Wedding Cake’s some 25 thousand 14-by-14-centimeter tiles (of which there are 99 different types) and thousand-plus additional ceramic pieces were fabricated by the Viúva Lamego manufactory in Sintra, a Portuguese hillside town whose ornate, candy-colored palaces inspired the scrumptious sculpture.
When conceptualizing an emblematic, timeless wedding cake, Vasconcelos studied the traditional dessert’s history, even making a dossier of famous historical examples, including Frank Sinatra’s, Queen Elizabeth’s, and, of course, the Rothschild family’s. She was particularly enthralled by pastry’s overlap with architecture and the engineering that keeps both types of structures solid. “Many wedding cakes have pillars, columns, and tiers. In a way, my sculpture is about the relationship between these two worlds—pastry and architecture—that are not normally connected.”
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On the sculpture’s ivory exterior, a menagerie of intricately carved, pastel-glazed elements—such as floral plaques, finials, busts, angels, mermaids, and functioning fish fountains—ooze Baroque buttercream opulence. Stepping through the entrance’s iron scrollwork doors, visitors enter a pavilion at once fantastical and mystical. Golden stars punctuate blue columns and a domed ceiling to create the illusion of looking up at the sky, an effect enhanced by discreet fiber-optic lights—both inside and out. While Vasconcelos primarily used angels and stars to adorn what she calls her “temple of love,” there’s a figurative nod to Portuguese culture in the sculptures of Saint Anthony (the patron saint for marriages and good luck, who hailed from Lisbon). “Italians and Brazilians also love Saint Anthony—it’s a real European story,” says Vasconcelos, who encourages people of all creeds and backgrounds to celebrate their nuptials at the installation.
Ascending the spiral staircases, visitors pass through monochromatic cotton candy pink and butter yellow floors evoking Wayne Thiebaud’s frosting-hued paintings of similar confections. The sculpture’s apex comfortably fits just two people; only when an ascending pair becomes the cake’s topper does the artist consider the work complete. “It’s an emotional and personal project, and I’m inviting you to finish it,” she says. At its summit, the intimacy of the viewing platform is juxtaposed with the vastness of Waddesdon’s surroundings. “I’m aiming for that moment where suspense and magic happen.”
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Wedding Cake is open for guided tours from June 18 through October 26 on Thursdays and selected Sundays. Tour tickets must be prebooked.