Service Description

Turn water into wine, make things appear to burn, or to turn, or to jump, or to change colour, do rope tricks with your hands, make cooked meat appear raw, make things appear to fly out of the oven, or to walk off your plate, make towers appear in a urine flask, make a coin appear (or disappear), make invisible ink. They could be used for playful or deceitful purposes (think of invisible ink for fraudulent activities). These were not always illustrated and I have scholar friends researching these manuscripts. Let’s work out how these sulphurous tricks were done by painting them and expose our own faulty walnuts. Craftspeople, we imagine, could already anyway produce amusing, wonderful and entertaining effects with the everyday materials of their trade. My husband made a magic pen box based on a medieval Arabic technical text that, on opening, made the pens rise by themselves as if by magic. Smoke and mirrors. Materials can go in many directions. Gunpowder can be a weapon or a firework. As painters, we already know how to make mushroom clouds appear inside water and to make colours float magically on the surface of water *. I once had a Thai herbal massage where they set my tummy on fire and I didn’t feel any pain (although I was watching the whole process with a beady eye and a slight bead of sweat on my forehead too). We take both a reverse-engineering and a ludic approach to these tricks. We channel Heston Blumenthal and play with our food. I had a friend who owned a fish and chip shop. Ask me what pranks we got up to at school. This class can be paired with the upcoming Edible Magic class, which also has a kitchenish element. You could optionally make this into a book form, the Book of Tricks… *How to make a mushroom cloud appear in water: … Just clean your brush! How to make colours float on water: Well, this is marbling. You also know how to faux-age paper… with tea…