In 1999 I went to an exhibition examining some artists’ response to natural processes. Out of all the pieces the work of Daniel Ladd stayed stuck in my mind all these years. On display were gourds that he had grown into molds shaped like human bodies. With surfaces as smooth as polished stone the process only gave itself away when you noticed the gourd stems.

Dan Ladd. Moulded gourd [ source ]

To do the pieces in the show, Ladd formed molds out of plaster using reproductions of classical sculptures. The mold was then placed in the garden and a young Lagenaria gourd placed inside. As the gourd was allowed to mature inside, it took on the shape of the mold. After frost, the mold was removed, revealing the artwork.

Ladd also uses other shapes as mold forms, but the ones I find most affecting are these torsos. When I started assembling this post I found his website which had maybe a dozen different examples of his gourd sculptures. When I looked again he’d taken them down. So you’ll have to imagine what they looked like based on this specimen that someone had preserved away from his site.

In addition to the gourd art, Ladd also works with elaborately manipulated living plants to form growing sculptures. The whole topiary-like idea of reshaping nature is there in these works, but the results are pretty different. His site, even though it’s currently a work in progress, has some examples.

In researching this post I ran into a whole pile of other things in this general area of vegetable torture, including another artist employing a similar technique.

Mary Catherine Newcomb. Molded eggplant from Product of Eden [ source ]

Mary Catherine Newcomb is a Canadian sculptor who also molds vegetables into human shapes. She then can add non-vegetable details, as you see to the left, in a project currently at the Rodman Hall Art Centre at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

On the vine, the sculptures are fun, though they don’t have the presence of Ladd’s work. When she takes her veggies and preserves them in glass bottles, however, they turn into something weird and unsettling, like embryos preserved in formaldehyde. Icky icky icky. I want one.

The art of molding gourds isn’t an invention by Ladd. In fact it goes back centuries in China, with its current master practitioner being Zhang Cairi. I have a dim recollection of having heard that vegetables were also molded in southern Europe–things like eggplant and tomatoes. That’s an area for me to do a little more research in. I’ll post anything I find out here. And if you know anything about, please let me know.

A few other gourd and molded vegetable resources:

VegiForms, a commercially available series of molds that lets you turn your fruit into cute sculptures.

Gourd art of other sorts. These are basically “just” decorated gourds.

Jim Story on shaping gourds, via the American Gourd Society.

Jim Widess demonstrates making molded portrait gourds.

Book: The Immortal Molded Gourds of Mr Zhang Cairi by Betty Finch and Guojun Zhang.