KERSTIN PRICKEN · CULINARY ARTIST
Artistic Director of Gastronomy · Experiential Design
Kerstin Pricken is a culinary artist and founder of VECETO, a global multidisciplinary studio working at the intersection of contemporary art, architectural design, and ephemeral gastronomy. Established in 2024, New Zealand, Veceto develops experiential design one occasion at a time, adressed to fashion houses and cultural institutions.
Raised in Germany, Kerstin Pricken's instinct for the convergence of mediums shaped her practice from the beginning: sculpture, space, and gastronomy as a single language, stone and its raw mineral weight, the moment a material reveals its inner architecture. Formal training in Nordic interior design and spatial design gave that sensibility its first structure. As a culinary artist, she remains entirely autodidactic, freed from the rigid doctrines of classical gastronomy. Intuition carries the work, sharpened by material, by time, and by experiment after experiment, each watched to its end. Grounded in sensory perception and immersive spatial study, food as artistic medium follows the same logic that runs through stone, silk, and architecture. Experiential design is where that logic reaches a room.
For a culinary artist working at this depth, the material is still wild: soft, wet, transforming under touch and heat and time. Rather than impose order on that chaos, she works with it, reads it, and finds the architecture that already lives inside the ingredient, waiting to be revealed. The work is built from knowing: where oil stops being an ingredient and becomes surface, at what moment a material is still soft enough to receive a mark and hard enough to hold it. Not flaws, but the work itself, and the foundation on which Kerstin Pricken has built her practice as a culinary artist, one material at a time.
Guided by the principle of Radical Elegance, a work is conceived as a site-specific installation that does not replace a space but fulfils it. Depending on the context, this process of Sensory Excavation manifests entirely differently, translating immersive layers into high-end physical form through edible scenography and tactile materiality. Layer by layer, an installation uncovers the one beneath, slowly, until perception itself becomes the occasion. Experiential design at this level moves through custom-designed objects in ceramic, stone, and silk: interactive performances, unexpected material interventions, objects folding into offerings. Set down with the weight of sculpture, the edible object becomes both presence and proposition. Texture is read in the room before language is. An experience to be touched and eaten. Multi-sensory in its reach. Sovereign in its space. Restraint is the signature of a culinary artist unwilling to overstate the work.
Conceptual from the first exchange, the brief guiding this gastronomic artist begins not with a menu but with a conversation about weight: the weight of the occasion, the weight of silence in a particular room, the weight of a material that has never been asked to carry this much before. Silk samples arrive before any ingredient does. Ceramic glazes are tested against the specific light of a venue not yet built. The work takes shape long before anything enters the room, and what it asks of the client is the same openness it demands of the space: to allow a form to emerge that could not have been anticipated. Held by those present, belonging entirely to the moment it was made for, each installation closes when the evening does.
Some occasions ask for a form that has not existed before. Kerstin Pricken answers them as Artistic Director of Gastronomy, in close dialogue between studio and client. Each environment is read as closely as the brief itself. Time moves differently inside such a brief: slower at the start, faster once the materials arrive. Whatever takes shape is not made again.
Selection is part of the work. In the end, a culinary artist whose pieces belong entirely to the moment they were made for.
