Ivan Day makes staggeringly realistic sugar sculptures that bring history to life

The Fitzwilliam Museum asked me to reinterpret historic objects to help tell the story of food in Europe between 1500 and 1800. I chose to do this by making mises-en-scène: three reconstructions of tables and meals, featuring pieces both from its collection and my own, furnished with faux food and sugar sculptures. I commissioned craftspeople to make the faux foods and created the sugar sculptures myself – it’s a historic craft unknown to many today. You can explain history in a very dry way, but if you can demonstrate how skilful people were by replicating their work, it can be a pleasant surprise.

My three tableaux were dictated by the Fitzwilliam’s objects. For instance, I spent a day going through the cutlery collection and found precious silver and ivory knives from the Stuart period. These were personal style statements for the wealthy. Rather than display them in a cabinet, I thought it would be great to see them in the context of a meal, so one of the installations – a reconstruction of a Baroque feast with extravagant pies – was inspired by these knives.

I also reconstructed an 18th-century English confectioner’s shop window and workbench, and a late Tudor banquet table for a wedding feast. For the banquet, I used a tablecloth from 1600, Venetian glassware and wonderful silver objects, but everything else – the tazze (cups), an architectural centrepiece and more – is made of sugar. If you mix sugar with gum tragacanth, it produces a malleable modelling material which is as fine as porcelain. Sugar sculptures were a tradition Europeans probably learned from the medieval Ottoman world; it was prevalent here from the 1500s through to the 1800s. They were expensive, but these sweets were a way of expressing your status and wealth.

Sugar sculptures were also about fun: the Tudors made playing cards out of sugar to be played with and then eaten, which I recreated for the show. On our table there’s an authentic-looking pair of sugar kid gloves made from one of the moulds I’ve collected, dating from c. 1600. It’s in terrible condition so I cast myself a useable silicone version. It’s taken me decades to put a collection together that enables me to authentically replicate foods.

There’s a growing genre of recreating our foodie past on television. The BBC frequently commissions programmes that try to resurrect culinary crafts such as sugar sculpture, but they often don’t have the necessary kit. I find the results disappointing. In the past there were sugar works as refined as any sculpture by Bernini or Michelangelo – the craftsmanship was absolutely staggering. I can’t create freehand sculpture up to historic standards, so I do it an easier way: by using the original moulds that the masters made and used.

For instance, in the confectioner’s window I’ve ornamented cakes using 18th-century moulds. These enable you to make, then assemble individual parts of an object – something like a crown might have eight or nine components. They come out flat, then you flex them round into 3d objects and fix them together (usually with a glue called isinglass, made from sturgeons’ bladders – it’s a very high collagen material).

Sugar sculpture began to be revived in the 1960s, particularly by people who wanted to make sugar flowers. But I focus on original sources to create my pieces. In the 18th and 19th centuries, confectioners used bone or ivory tools to press the different components – so I made flowers for the confectioner’s window using these tools.

There were challenges: some of this stuff is very technically difficult. There’s a sugar flower basket of amazingly delicate latticework, made from a mould that has spiderweb-fine grooves, which was really challenging to use. Learning a historic craft when there are few existing handbooks is tricky.

To furnish the tables, I worked with the sculptor Tony Barton and the taxidermist David Astley. Tony produces uncannily realistic food models – such as lobsters and incredibly convincing oysters. He took the crustaceans apart, cast each section separately, made moulds, cast resin positives from them, then put these back together so they are articulated with flexible limbs. They’re sprayed and hand-painted to a high level of verisimilitude.

On the Baroque table are pies topped by feathered birds. It was a tradition in wealthy households to put a peacock or a swan on a pastry case, which had that animal’s meat inside. They often gilded the beaks and eyes and stuck gold leaf onto feathers – they even adorned birds with necklaces. There are paintings in the Fitzwilliam illustrating this.

The two exhibition curators – Vicky Avery, keeper of applied arts at the Fitzwilliam, and Melissa Calaresu, a historian at Cambridge – are people I’ve known for a long time. Several years ago I suggested exploring the food-related possibilities of the collection. As such, I was not just commissioned but I shaped many aspects of the exhibition, as Vicky and Melissa aren’t food specialists. About 90 per cent of the cookery books displayed in the cases belong to me – in total, I’ve lent about 90 items to the show. The museum has plenty of precious objects made of glass, silver and porcelain, and lots of paintings, but they don’t own culinary equipment.

The commission was made easier thanks to the fact I’ve done other work of this kind in places such as The Met and The Getty in Los Angeles. This is probably my last exhibition, however. It’s my swansong, if you’ll forgive the pun.