![big rock candy mountain big rock candy mountain](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/68/b9/9d/68b99dedc61ecb6906f5ed1442677ef3.jpg)
The artists’ first highly successful project with students was the research and production of a chocolate bar, SOUR VS SOUR (2016). Through a pedagogical social practice, they engage students with non-traditional, extended notions of what art can be-a combination of research, workshops, taste testing (more than 30 types of gum), learning about the chemistry of “food” (comparing natural and synthetic gum bases and flavours), discussions with artists, learning about how marketing works through involvement in packaging design and brand concept, and so on.
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Jickling and Reed have spent the past four years on a research project, Big Rock Candy Mountain, with students at Vancouver’s Queen Alexandra Elementary School, turning the classroom into a candy factory. A little more than texture-does it make your mouth water? Does it pop? Is it slimy?…it’s a slippery aesthetics, fuzzy authorship and tactile information that goes beyond our typical knowing.” Most important of all is mouthfeel, which artists Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed call “the feeling of something touching the sides of your cheeks, your tongue, your teeth. When it’s bubble gum, pleasure relates to how well the tongue can penetrate the gum while pushing air through it, to create that expanding shiny bubble-how large the bubble can get before the diaphanous pink membrane bursts with a powdery or snappy poof. Another factor essential to the pleasure of chewing gum is how long the optimal flavour and texture lasts.
![big rock candy mountain big rock candy mountain](https://candymountainresort.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/big-rock-candy-mountain-resort.jpg)
Chewing gum brings oral pleasure-a combination of muscular movement, caressing of tongue and inner mouth as one masticates the wad, textural nuance, flavour and density/elasticity of the gum base, type and amount of sugar (saliva fusing with it to create a syrup that can cause squirting of the salivary glands).