Can food be art? Prudence Emma Staite certainly thinks so - she's launching a gallery dedicated to her chocolate portraits and sculptures. "I have worked with other foods," she says, "but chocolate is something that everybody has some kind of relationship with from an early age, it's universal." Her initial experiments with edible art brought mixed results. "When I was working with cheese and bacon it was a bit more grotesque ... it was quite disturbing," say Prudence Emma. "Chocolate has got so many connotations to it," she continues. "Some people view it as sinful but I only use the really good stuff. "I'm very much into promoting that and letting people know that chocolate is very good for you as long as you're eating the right stuff."
Yum Of course, working with the sweet brown stuff has certain occupational hazards. "I do consume quite a lot through actually making my work," says Prudence Emma, "I'm always melting, sculpting (and) I chisel it with my teeth"  I'd like to do a life-size Nelson's Column...
 | | Prudence Emma Staite |
Her oeuvre includes portraits and painstaking casts of various (sometimes rather personal) parts of the human anatomy. "I tend to cast my own body but I can do anybody's," she says. "I paint latex on in layers ... it's fine to eat, it's safe. "I like the idea that you can eat anything and doing the body parts it's kind of like hinting at cannibalism ... and a lot of stuff which I can't really go into at the moment!"  | | A selection of chocol-art |
Glucose She's even found a way to fashion heatproof chocolate jewellery. "I make the chocolate into a paste with glucose, it doesn't melt unless it gets really really hot. Prudence Emma is launching a studio near Tewkesbury on the 30th of may, which will serve as an invitation-only showcase for her work.
But her chocol-art ambitions don't stop there: "I'd like to do a life-size Nelson's Column next to the real thing, and a two-storey house made out of chocolate!" 
If you would like to comment on this story get in touch at [email protected]or have your say on our messageboard | 
Most artists would be very cross if you ate their work, but not Prudence Emma Staite. She makes portraits and sculptures from chocolate.
