FROM boat building to award-winning sculptured food, that is the journey of Newcastle creative Jon Pryer.
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Last month in Lyon, France, he was part of the Australian Pastry Team competing in the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie.
Pryer discovered the world of food sculpture after meeting Newcastle-based pastry chef and TAFE teacher Dean Gibson. Gibson had enrolled in a 3D printing course run by Pryer.
"Dean is heavily into chocolate," Pryer said. "He has competed [in chocolate competitions] at a world class level."
Together the pair hatched a plan to do something no one else had dared with chocolate.
"We found someone who let us put chocolate on their $100,000 CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled)." Pryer said. "We experimented and it shaped it beautifully. It gave us the accuracy needed to produce something unique”.
In 2017, the pair produced Bone Shaker, a 150kg rhinoceros head automaton, the world's first 100 per cent chocolate, mechanical sculpture.
"You wound a handle and the jaws moved, the eyes rolled, the ears wiggled and the head nodded," Pryer said.
Bone Shaker was exhibited at the 2017 Smooth Chocolate Festival, where he met Yves Scherrer manager of the Australian Pastry Team.
Pryer built the base for their chocolate and sugar sculpture entry in the Asian Pastry
Cup, which placed third qualifying them for the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie.
It took more than six months to design and trial the the Coupe de Monde entry comprising chocolate, ice and sugar sculptures and deserts.
Designed by Pryer in Newcastle and built by the team of chefs practising every weekend in Sydney.
Standing 1.4m high the entry had a rotating base and featured a chocolate eagle as the main sculptural element.
The show piece was produced live in Lyon, on January 28, in 10 hours of competition in front a live audience, the culmination of months of practice and training back in Australia.
"It's a pretty intense thing,"; Pryer said. "People are filming, the judges are walking around watching, the audience is chanting”
The Australian team came first in the chocolate category, and also won the team spirit award. They placed sixth overall, the highest position achieved by an Australian team.
Pryer grew up in the UK building boats with his father. At 17 his family moved to Australia. He studied sculpture at what is now Swinburne University of Technology.
"I always planned to study industrial design, but I wanted to do sculpture first as a grounding, and it’s served me well”. he said.
Pryer relocated to Newcastle in the late 90s to lecture at the University of Newcastle. He now teaches at TAFE and consults as an industrial designer under the name Neo Industrial Design.