A confectioner who practices alchemy by night comes upon a print of Durer’s perspective machine. Having only the lines on paper to guide her, she creates a candy window from the finest honey, distilled aromatic essences from her garden and ground spices from around the world that she has collected. The divisions of taste create boundaries of space in the frame. The window creates a perspective hinge, and she folds it down away from her and replaces the lines of the frame with a red thread woven like Arachne, leaving traces of the candy window like Daedalus might have left in the labyrinth. She pounds sugar and egg whites in a mortar and pestle to fill the lines projected on the floor by the window with twenty-four tiles and places them in a bed of sugar. Finally, she invites her children in to eat the machine and enjoy.

In his chapter on grotesques, François Quivigier describes the work of the Florentine writer Anton Francesco Doni (1513-1574), son of a scissors-maker, who took up the idea of the grotesque, describing them as “castles in the air,” or as figures projected by the imagination onto clouds, dust and dirty walls (Quiviger, 2010: 72). Grotesques are works of the imagination, hybrids of the internal world and the external world. In architecture, the grotesque is often associated with gargoyles used to direct water away from the walls of buildings, but they are also figures understood as incomplete, caught in the act of becoming (Frascari, 1990: 1). They are works of wit.

The chimneys at Thornbury are curious figures, projected by the imagination or wit of the mason onto the white clouds as they sit perched high atop the fine Cotswolds ashlar stone of the walls, and equally projected onto the ground as a black shadow. The chimney acts as a black sweet soteltie, drawing attention to the craft of the sugar-twist art of the confectioner and chimney mason alike. Dug, moulded, and shaped from local clay, the dust of the earth, the soft medieval brick core of the chimney at Thornbury would be exposed in the process of cutting and rubbing them into their formal splendour, making them susceptible to the effects of the environment. Rain, wind and sun would slowly weather the clay, muting the forms over time, as if the atmosphere was slowly dissolving the clay in her cheek like a candy.