San Francisco is a city built on an active fault zone and is famous for having a decidedly off-kilter subculture. It’s only natural, then, that the city’s unstable beauty should be captured perfectly by a jiggly dessert. Bay Area artist and photographer Liz Hickok may have cornered the market on a truly unique artistic pursuit: gelatin sculpting. Always interested in maps and models, Hickok set about building a scale model of the city three years ago, while she was pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. After experimenting with various media to form buildings, she found them all either too difficult or too expensive.

"I’m a bit of a 'foodie' and love sweets,” she says. "And I’ve always been attracted to color and light, so I sort of stumbled on the idea of Jell-O...