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Beauty is often found in the most unlikely and overlooked places.

Artist Judith G. Klauser of Somerville finds her inspiration in small, everyday objects that easily recede into the background. In the past, she’s worked with insects, baby teeth and fingernails. She also works with food. Specifically, processed food.

In a series called “From Scratch,” Klauser uses Oreo cookies to make finely detailed cameos (she sculpts the frosting with toothpicks, pins and a sculpture stick); cereal, for her elaborate cross-stitch samplers; toast, as a base for embroidery and condiments, such as ketchup and mustard; and paint, to create wallpaper.

While the choice of medium is significant, there is a social and political current that runs through these works (on today’s broadcast of Here and Now, Klauser will discuss this with host Robin Young).

To complement that interview, PRK spoke with Klausner about the ‘ins and outs’ of playing with perishable items and the process behind making art with processed food.

Could you tell me a bit about the process of making of these pieces? For instance, how long does it typically take to make an Oreo cameo?

The Oreo cameos take between two and six hours, I’d say, depending on the level of detail. Some of them have more fine detail than others. But it also depends on the particular microtextures of the Oreo itself. On that small of a scale, they do have differences in texture from cookie to cookie. Some are easier or harder to work with. The environment, in terms of the heat and humidity, also makes a big difference in terms of how quickly I can work, and how often I have to stop…When I’m working in the summer (I don’t have central air conditioning), I often have to put the pieces into the refrigerator, so that the frosting will firm up and allow for finer sculptural detail.

How did food become an interest for you as an artist? I know you’ve worked with unusual materials, such as insects, in the past, but how did food enter the picture?

Well, in the non-artistic part of my life, food has always been an interest. I love food. I love to cook. I love to eat, so it’s a big part of my life. I’m also hypoglycemic, so I have to eat very frequently; food is a very consistent part of my life. It has been for a long time. In some ways, it’s an oddly natural progression from insects, I think, because when I started looking at insects, it had to do with looking at things that otherwise I would just look past. After I had worked with insects for a while, I decided I really wanted to open up my artistic horizons, [and] it became a challenge of looking around me and trying to see what I wasn’t seeing and what objects there were in my life that were really background noise. I was looking for things that, separated from their normal context, had interesting aesthetic qualities and had important social implications, and food certainly has all of those things.

You talked about the challenges of working with cookies, in terms of their texture and their sensitivity to temperature and moisture, but it seems like the work you do embroidering on toast would be an order of magnitude more difficult. But perhaps I just think that because I don’t know how to embroider?

To be honest, I didn’t really know how to embroider either until I started, but it was something I’d always been interested in doing. The embroidery pieces were actually the most difficult of all, in part because I was learning, to some extent, to embroider… on toast! It’s also because toast is simply a lot less forgiving than the other materials I was working with: once a piece of toast cracks, there’s nothing you can do with it — it’s cracked. If you’re lucky, it’s after your first stitch, and if you’re not, it’s after you’ve been working on it for twenty hours. The egg one took the longest of any of the pieces. It involved really dense stitching and, as I was embroidering, the toast was getting drier and drier and little bits were falling off as I went. It was a rather itchy process really, because I ended up with little toast crumbs all over me. Eventually, as the toast was getting drier and drier, I was stitching more and more on top of other stitching. By the last two hours, I was convinced the whole thing was going to fall apart. Luckily, once it was finished, it holds itself together quite well, but I wouldn’t want to drop it!

Did you have to go through a lot of different types of bread to find a type that worked well for embroidery, or is this just your normal toasting bread?

Most of the food I use is not the food I eat normally. I live close to a bakery and I buy fresh-baked bread from our bakery. But I wanted to go with the quintessential, basic sliced bread, which I have eaten at various times in my life, but this was just bread from my local 7-11. It was a store brand, a big bag of uniform slices of bread, and it actually works remarkably well.

Are there any other foods that you’re interested in using in future works?

One of my ideas for the future is doing cut-paper dioramas, but instead of using paper, using American cheese slices. I’ve done some experiments making silhouettes using American cheese and decided I wanted to do something more detailed…the cheese can take it. My experiments involved letting the cheese sit out, unrefrigerated, to see what happened to the slices. It turns out they actually behave like Shrinky Dinks. If you leave American cheese out for months, it shrinks and hardens. It’s a little alarming in a food substance, but it certainly works well for me.

More:

• Judith Klausner chats with Robin Young on Here & Now.  Listen HERE.