KERSTIN PRICKEN · CULINARY ARTIST
Artistry 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, the practice moves between New Zealand and New York, working globally with luxury fashion brands and cultural institutions on experiential design projects developed for singular occasions.
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, however, she remains entirely autodidactic, freed from the rigid doctrines of classical gastronomy. That freedom is her greatest asset, intuition sharpened rather than schooled. Grounded in sensory perception and immersive spatial study, food as medium and food as artistic medium are approached with the same logic that runs through stone, silk, and architecture, carried now into her approach to experiential design.
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, the foundation of an experiential design practice and the work of a culinary artist that now defines Kerstin Pricken's name in the field.
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 realities through edible scenography and tactile materiality. Layer by layer, an installation uncovers the one beneath, slowly, so that perception becomes the event. Experiential design at this level moves through custom-designed objects in ceramic, stone, and silk: interactive performances, unexpected material interventions, object folding into offering. Set down with the weight of sculpture, the edible object becomes both presence and proposition. Entering the room, a guest reads texture before language. 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, an immersive installation art that closes when the evening does.
Responding to environments where an occasion demands a form that has not existed before, as a culinary artist and Artistry Director of Gastronomy, Kerstin Pricken develops every project in close dialogue between studio and client, extending the language of experiential design across luxury fashion brands and cultural institutions. Time moves differently inside this kind of brief, slower at the start, faster once the materials arrive, and the outcome is never repeated once it has taken shape.
Kerstin Pricken accepts selective work only, singular in its making, impossible to repeat. In the end, a culinary artist whose experiential design belongs entirely to the moment it was made for.
