Core77

When Grace Jones first broke onto the scene over twenty years ago, many thought of the gender-bending pop icon more as a Jean Paul Goude media creation and personality than a true talent. Indeed image has always been an integral part of Grace Jones' music career, her visual identity being almost as important as her voice. Now, the artwork for her latest album, Hurricane, brings new meaning to the the idea of dancing confectionary...

Collaborating with Tom Hingston Studio, Ms. Jones once again works the conceit of the popstar as visual commodity, in this case featuring life-size versions of herself made out of chocolate.

Here's how they did it...

Photographed by Jonathan De Villiers, the cover for Hurricane features a production line of chocolate Grace Jones heads with supporting imagery showing Jones inspecting a range of body parts at various stages of the manufacturing process.

Hingston says,

The original idea was to produce a set of images of Grace being mass-produced but with her being in control of the actual process. The crux of the concept is that she has ownership of her identity. We looked at a range of manufacturing processes, from car makers to pottery factories, but there was something about her being made of chocolate that had [the right] connotations.

Whilst scouting the Thorntons Chocolates factory in Derbyshire, United Kingdom as a potential location for a shoot, the chocolatiers suggested making up the moulds for each of the body parts (16 in all) and creating them there in the factory.

It takes about 20 minutes for each mould to set, and for the head there are just two small holes for the nostrils. But Grace was up for it and her participation was key to the idea. Of course, we were working with someone who's used to being the muse or subject of such an unusual process.

Indeed, this is a woman who was the face of La Beaute Sauvage, the surrealist ad for the Citroen CX in the 1980s. Being made into chocolate no doubt seems like a walk in the park. But given the fact that the inlay images are much more compelling than the actual cover art, we're wondering if the idea isn't better than the execution.