“I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."  – Anais Nin                               

Chipper Confections Art www.ChipperConfectionsArt.com   (new site design coming soon) is the business-minded sister of  Charitable Confections.  Although Chipper is more profit-oriented, she still feels that it's important to give back, so 5% of proceeds from all sales are donated to the Vermont-based NPO Pure Water for the World (www.purewaterfortheworld.org), which provides sustainable water solutions, sanitation, and hygiene education to communities in the developing world. 

 Sugar Paintings About Social Causes @ 1369 Coffee House/Central Square  June 18-Aug 18

 Each of the paintings has an accompanying write-up, which can be found below:

 

 1. The Cost of Greed II

The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that there are currently over 40 million modern day slaves world-wide; other organizations place the count as high as 46 million. The bi-partisan Harkin-Engel Protocol, aimed at ending child slavery on cacao plantations in West Africa was signed in 2001; nevertheless, slavery remains rampant in this industry.

 

While doing research on cacao plantations in Ghana in the late 2000s, I had conversations with farmers working on fair trade plantations, who told me that many Western corporations had no qualms about using slave-harvested beans in order to save mere pennies per 16 kilo sacks. I don’t know how accurate their estimate was, and given that large corporations buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of beans every year, the amount saved would, of course, add up to large amounts of money (in 2019, world production of cacao beans was 5.6 tonnes).

 

In June of 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two American corporations --Nestle USA and Cargill – who were accused of complicity in child slavery on cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire. The plaintiffs were six citizens of Mali, who were trafficked into slavery as children, and who claimed that the companies “knew or should have known” that the farms were using enslaved children and that they did not use their economic power to stop the practice. The Court wrote that the corporations did not own or operate farms in that country and were not sufficiently tied to the asserted abuses. 

 

I thought about the dollar amount that would represent what it would take for a person of poor character to succumb to greed, ignoring the ethics involved in harvesting their cacao beans.  For the original The Cost of Greed, which was exhibited (and sold) at the Beacon Gallery in 2019, I crafted a $100 bill out of potato starch paper. I have since become a bit more cynical, so for this second iteration, I opted for a $50 bill that is being consumed by a larger, more voracious mouth. 

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2.  Priorities 64/292: Marie-ange’s Dream addresses the topic of the lack of access to safe water that two billion people deal with on a daily basis. The 64/292 references the United Nations resolution passed in 2010 that recognized having access to potable water as being a basic human right.  Marie-Ange was one of the women in Cite Soleil whom I interviewed years ago, and the following true story –rendered in a “fairy tale” type styling – is about her plight to obtain safe water for her community. 

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away called Haiti, there lived a kind-hearted matriarch named Marie- ange. Marie-ange lived in the slum village of Cite Soleil. Her village was dry and dusty and the inhabitants lived in corroded tin huts that had dirt floors.  The murky water in the ravine was over-run with trash, and wild boars could often be found wading through the refuse, seeking something to snack upon. There were no fish to be found in the ravine, much to Marie-ange’s dismay. She had seen videos on social media of vibrant aquariums that the fancy people in other countries had in their homes. She dreamed of one day having enough clean water to accommodate all the people in her village and even have her own small aquarium to brighten her dreary hut. 

 

Many of the village people didn’t have money to buy enough food to sustain them, so they would often go to bed as early as 7pm just to try to forget about their hunger pains in the land of slumber. There was no potable water; just one rusty faucet that would periodically spurt out water that looked clean, but was actually filled with evil microbes. These microbes were very dangerous shape shifters that could disguise themselves as healthy water molecules.

 

The only way the villagers could access safe water was by purchasing small plastic bags of filtered water from street vendors in the neighboring village of Delmas. Every week, Marie-ange would take a colorful carriage called a tap-tap to Delmas and purchase as many bags as she could afford. The bags of water were expensive, so she often would give her ration to the children in her neighborhood.

 

Every day, Marie-ange observed the village children and young adults wilted from dehydration while doing her chores outside.  Many had sunken eyes and distorted bellies that their frail bodies could barely support.  

 

This pained Marie-ange very much, and one day she said “Enough!” She decided to take action, so she beseeched a small, local nonprofit to help her. The Haitian man in charge was named Jean, and he, too, was kind hearted like Marie-Ange. Even though he had no experience building water filters, he decided he would try his best. He found two neighborhood bricklayers, and together they built a 125-gallon plastic tank that had a mesh filter and valve for dispensing chlorine, which was the arch enemy of the evil shape shifting microbes. They installed the system in Marie-Ange’s backyard, and it was filled with enough water every two weeks by a commercial delivery truck to accommodate Marie-Ange and all the neighborhood children.    

 

Marie-ange and the children were so happy to have the potable water. For the first time in their lives, they didn’t have to worry about getting sick every time they quenched their thirst, and they had so much more energy now that they were no longer dehydrated all the time. Marie-Ange studied to become a hairdresser and even started to earn money by getting clients from Delmas, where people were not quite as impoverished. 

She celebrated her new lease on life by artfully painting an orange, flame-like streak in her hair to symbolize the power of a strong woman.

 

But then one day Marie-ange got into an accident and broke her leg. She was in so much pain and couldn’t walk and she had no money to go to a doctor. After much deliberation, she decided that she would sell the chlorine dispenser in order to have money to get her leg fixed. She thought that once her leg had healed, she could go back to work and earn the money to buy a new dispenser. Unfortunately, the man she went to heal her was not a real doctor and he didn’t set her leg properly.   

 

A year later, Marie-Ange’s injured leg still bowed out dramatically to the right. She could only walk with the aid of a cane and was always in pain. She hadn’t been able to work and buy a new chlorine dispenser, so she and the local children were, once again, falling susceptible to waterbourne diseases. 

 

One day, Marie-Ange came upon a young girl with braids eschew in a pink t-shirt that puffed out at the belly. The girl was leaning against a big rock and crying. Her eyes were jaundiced and her shoulders curved forward with exhaustion.

 

“What’s wrong, my child?” Marie-ange asked her.

 

“No one cares about me and I will always be thirsty and sick,” the child wailed.

Marie Ange hugged her and said “Dry your eyes, my child. One day, another kind person like Mr. Jean will come to help us and we will have all the beautiful water we could ever want. We just have to be patient.”

The to-be-continued end .....      

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3. Maslow Recongfigured: 2-D addresses the topic of the importance of education in developing nations -- specifically in Armenia.

In 1943, influential American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, first conceptualized a hierarchy of human needs that is often presented as a five-level pyramid arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency. The base of the pyramid is comprised of the most basic physical requirements such as food, water, sleep, and shelter/personal safety.

The literacy rate in Armenia is 99.7%, and in the capital of Yerevan, there are a selection of top-notch primary and secondary schools such as The Avedisian School, which was built by the Armenian Missionary Association of America – a faith-based nonprofit founded in 1918. Unfortunately, in developing nations such as Armenia, basic needs are not always met, making it difficult for some of the nation’s youth to achieve their full potential. Sometimes, when faced with a dearth of tangible necessities, one must turn to faith and spiritual transcendence to get by.

For this piece, I re-imagined Maslow’s concept of hierarchy by placing the pyramids that represent water, nourishment, and safety floating on top of a long, pristine pillar that symbolizes the intangible elements of spirituality and faith. The butterflies perched inside the triangle-shaped window are emblems of hope.

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4. T3 Tsunami  

4.2 billion people worldwide lack access to safe sanitation and 2 billion use drinking water sources contaminated with feces.

 

The “T” in the title of this piece stands for toilets, and the “3” represents sanitation, water, and global health. While the importance of safe water is recognized by everyone, its connection to safe sanitation is not always made. Lack of potable water leads to global health issues.  The 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti – which was caused by foreign peacekeeping troops dumping their fecal matter into the Artibonite River -- is a prime example of cause and effect and of how closely sanitation, safe water, and global health are intertwined.  

 

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