Pelikan is a sculptor, book artist, and paper conservator who teaches “Artists’ Books: An Introduction” at the Museum School. She first introduced food as a classroom material in the fall of 2003, inspired by the International Edible Books Festival, which commemmorates the April 1st birthday of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The festival, open to anyone, takes place mostly in libraries, galleries, and art schools. Pelikan made her first edible book out of springroll wrappers and peas, stitching the parchment-like pages together with celery “thread.” “Once you do this, you never look at food the same way again,” she says.

In the classroom, Pelikan spreads out her supplies. She brings in mostly colorful vegetables; her students contribute items such as graham crackers, marshmallow fluff, slices of bread, and sheets of nori. They circle around and choose their materials. “Everyone comes with their own agenda,” Pelikan says. The students range from first-year undergraduates to Master’s degree candidates; they are sculptors, photographers, painters, and filmmakers. Some have worked only with computers. “I encourage my students to push around their understanding of what a book can be,” Pelikan says. “I always want to enlarge their expectation of where art can be found.”

By the end of class, the results are startlingly beautiful. The students weave strands of licorice into book pages, stitch curls of leek into scrolls, and bind purple cabbage leaves and flour tortillas together with a chive. Pelikan, who can wax poetic about the beauty of shell beans, is an appreciative audience. “I tend to walk through life celebrating things so ordinary that you normally wouldn’t look twice,” she says. “Then you pull them out of context and work with them, and they take your breath away.”

For more information about the International Edible Books Festival, visit http://www.books2eat.com. To see more images of student work from Pelikan’s class, visit http://web.mac.com/annepelikan.