SWEET POISON
In Sweet Poison, Cristina Burns constructs a hyper-stylized universe where seduction and suffering coexist beneath a glossy surface of sugar-coated desire. The series presents anthropomorphic figures—often female—transformed by processed food aesthetics into uncanny icons of submission, ecstasy, and emotional collapse. Each character is both altar and offering, swathed in confections that blur the boundary between nourishment and narcotic, devotion and dependence.
At once surreal and disturbingly intimate, the works evoke the language of advertising, childhood nostalgia, and sacred ritual. Cake becomes a crown. Ice cream a wound. Frosting a veil for longing.  Burns’s figures are rendered powerless not through violence, but through worship—of sweetness, of beauty, of someone or something they cannot resist.
Sweet Poison is not simply a commentary on consumer culture or addiction. It is a poetic autopsy of how we give ourselves away: to the wrong person, to a toxic ideal, to the insatiable hunger for perfection. Seduction here is spiritual and chemical. The result is a series that is as arresting as it is unsettling, balancing on the knife’s edge between visual delight and emotional decay.
A surreal nude female figure with a towering slice of smiling cake in place of her head. Surrounded by pastel pink frosting and set against a radiant blue backdrop, she stands in a pose of total surrender, her body both sacred and devoured.
HOLY SUGAR, 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
Devotion rendered as consumption: a figure becomes shrine and offering to a sweetness she cannot resist.
A whimsical humanoid figure dressed in a cartoon-style schoolgirl outfit, topped with a swirl of pink whipped cream and sticker-like eyes for a face. Set in a pastel dreamscape, she floats between sweetness and psychological unease.
TIC TOC - COTTON CANDY DELIRIUM , 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request
A candy-colored trance of obedience and dissociation, nostalgia whipped into a state of pleasant surrender.
A vulnerable, nude childlike figure with a melting scoop of pink ice cream for a head, holding a bleeding anatomical heart labeled “TRUE LOVE.” A stitched scar runs down her chest, symbolizing emotional sacrifice, naive devotion, and heartbreak beneath sugary illusion.
TRUE LOVE, 2015
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Limited edition print – dimensions available upon request​​​​​​​
“In a pink bubble of romantic idealism, she offers everything, heart exposed, body unguarded. But love, like sugar, melts. And sometimes, it scars.”

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