After having moved to Melbourne, Australia from Nelson, New Zealand in 2007, not much is known about the mysterious and elusive Urban Cake Lady. The only information I could find was from an interview to fellow street-artist Facter 10 years ago on November 26, 2010 on Invurt.
Facter described her colourful, vibrant and eye-catching work which often features a female in a red hoodie and striped tights. The character doesn’t have a face underneath the hood, so people can fill in those unknown details themselves. She confessed that the unnamed character is a kind of self portrait, but for all intense and purposes she sees the character as an anonymous one.
Her smaller pieces took around 8-10 hours, and the larger ones, anywhere between 15-20 hours to complete. When it comes to placement of her art, Urban Cake Lady usually tries to avoid using brick walls because of the red on red aspect – so that cuts out quite a lot. She often keeps her eyes open for other coloured walls, and goes on little scouting missions to look for new spots. Otherwise, she finds that it just ends up being a pretty long night biking around and looking for somewhere – she prefers to have a place in mind, and be focussed on that.
With a full time job, Urban Cake Lady only has time to paint at nights and on weekends. When pasting her art, she claims that she has been caught a couple of times, but has never had to do a ‘runner’. On one occasion she reflected “I think the police were more amused than anything, and I hate to say it, but being a polite girl probably worked in my favour. I’m not risking as much as others are if I’m caught with just paper and paste, but I’m still fairly cautious, and I try not to draw attention to myself”.
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