Some people just have it. They have the ability to tackle every task with such passion and meticulousness it makes the rest of us look like half-baked half-wits with no conviction.

Sharon Core’s remarkable array of finely-tuned skills, including gardening, baking and treasure-hunting, has landed her in the spotlight on the international contemporary fine art photography scene.  

Core’s 2003 – 2004 Thiebaud series involved physically constructing the subject matter featured in Wayne Thiebaud’s iconic 1960 paintings of luscious feasts: cakes, hot-dogs, pies and tarts, and photographing it in the exact likeness of the original painting.

Her photographs are even printed in the same size as the original canvases.

Core saw Thiebaud’s paintings in a 2001 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and said that they seemed so familiar to her that she wanted to “construct them from the bottom up—to make them a reality.”

Every delicious mock-up morsel down to the last crumb was baked by Core’s own fair hand. Her artistic process is paramount to the finished product and whilst enjoying the sumptuous images, thinking about the labor that went into creating them is what, for me, makes them so spectacular.  

Sharon Core was born in 1965 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received a BFA from the University of Georgia in 1987 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1998, where she was awarded the George Sakier Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography.

Core’s latest body of work “Early American” demands that she abandon her apron for gardening gloves as she grows nearly every fruit and vegetable for her photographic simulations of 19^th-century paintings by Raphaelle Peale.

Core hunted down antique serving pieces to correspond with Peale’s graceful props. In fact, she has grown heirloom grapes and melons because crockery was smaller in Peale’s time.

Core’s painstaking recreations turn the traditional relationship between painting and photography on its head. We are used to seeing paintings produced from photographs, not the other way around.

Core’s work achieves the perfect balance of creativity and persistence – making her a force to be reckoned with; an unstoppable wave of ingenuity tearing through the art world.