NEW! Article, The OptiMst, by Miche Genest 2002

Kim Matthews thinks about food all the time. She buys high-end cooking magazines and gazes for hours at portraits of cakes and pies. She goes to Food Fair and grooves on the acorn squash, handling them, feeling their weight, holding them in the air to study their colours. She keeps onions and turnips beside her desk while she works.
"I feel like a freak, being so passionate about it," she says of her obsession. But there is a rationale for her behaviour, having its root in what Henry James called "the madness of art." Matthews is a miniatures artist, and food is her subject.
Working on a scale of 1:12 inches, she creates tiny perfect replicas of every foodstuff imaginable, from green grapes to roasted sirloin to strawberry shortcake. She fashions entire feasts and lays them out on dolls’ house dining tables, or builds a vegetable stand and fills it with little bushel baskets brimming with fall produce.
Her studio is lined with shelves holding one diminutive treasure after another: tiny bows for Christmas presents, pansies the size of a lentil. The visitor feels like Alice in Wonderland, or Gulliver in Lilliput, amazed, caught fast in the particular fascination we reserve for that which is very very small. Hers is a world of unbelievable detail, where the creator’s imagination can be felt working full tilt.
Matthews spends days, sometimes weeks trying to get one of her creations right. If it works, if she captures essential grape-ness or ur-turkey, it’s because there is an intimate connection between how she makes art and how food is made.
"Sculpting for me is about growing something from the inside out, and food grows that way, it lives that way, it gets baked that way."
And so, she overcame the problem of turkey by making tiny bones first, and then draping a "skin" paper clay over the bones.
She characterizes what she does as layering. "It’s the same as painting – it’s a layering of colours, of textures to get the right look, the right balance that makes it look like food, real food, scaled down."
That’s the thing with her work, a turkey doesn’t look like a tiny fake turkey trying to look real, it looks like a real turkey that just came out of the oven, complete with brown spots where it cooked unevenly.
When Matthews talks about making apples, she sounds like a gardener. "I grow the apples. That’s really really important to me."
At first she tried to mix the exact apple-red colour by looking at an apple and fooling around with her paint box. But it wasn’t really working, until she started to think about how an apple ripens.
"That was the turning point for me, of seeing it from the inside out. Apples start green and ripen to red. And so my apples will reflect that. One side is a little bit darker than the other, because the sun hits it more there."
Matthews attitude infuses her miniature world with life. "Not all of the apples are perfect because not all apples are going to be perfect. Some are riper than others, some are smaller."
Matthews sculpts the apples out of polymer clay, then sticks them with toothpicks and bakes them in the holes of Ryvita crackers before painting each one. She says one of the most-asked questions in studio visits is, "What do you use these crackers for?’"
Her response was always, "Oh, growing apples, actually."
The strange imperatives of the tiny world she spends so much time in are second nature to Matthews. Her father was a minatures artist, specializing in wood furniture, and she worked alongside him as a child.
"He was the most amazing art teacher I ever had."
It was her father’s recent request for miniature food to go into a room box he was building that propelled Matthews into her current passion.
(A room box is a 3-D recreation of a room in a box fronted with glass, so a viewer can gaze and gaze, but not touch.) People in his miniatures club saw her work, raved about it, and ordered some for their own projects.
Matthews soon discovered she loved making miniature food. And she loved the audience response. "Everyone identifies with it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a trucker or a little girl. Everyone makes that tiny ‘eeuuw it’s so cute!’ sound when they look at a miniature."
Matthews would love to see her pieces in "the fully stacked dolls house. You know, where the kitchen is in oaks and blues, so they choose my piece because it’s in the blue bowl."
That kitchen would probably be Victorian, the era most favoured by doll’s house hobbyists and miniature makers. For Matthews, what’s interesting is the limits imposed by the Victorian era. No bananas, for example, because bananas didn’t make it to England until later.
The search for authenticity has led Matthews to an in-depth examination of the Victorian kitchen, of food, its preparation and the politics surrounding it.
"There were all these weird rules -- like you had to wash asparagus eight times in ice cold water." Matthews is fascinated by who would be washing the asparagus – a scullery maid? under whose direction? how would she be treated?
She’s also fascinated by the contrast between the kitchen and the dining room, the servants and the served.
"I have an old radio cabinet, and my dream is to have a servant’s kitchen at the bottom, and reflect their lifestyles, and upstairs have what they’re preparing for, the grand dinner party, the huge feast."
Until then, Matthews will continue to buy magazines and gaze, and set herself more and more difficult tasks, like Martha Stewart wedding cakes.
She’ll be helped in this by the growing number of friends she draws into her pursuit, friends who send her miniature coffee beans, or call her with brainstorms about how to solve the onion problem. Once you enter Matthews’ tiny food universe, it’s very hard to leave.