A confection is an assembly of many visual events, selected from various Streams of Story, then brought together and juxtaposed on the still flatland of paper. By means of multiplicity of image-events, confections illustrate an argument, present and enforce visual comparisons, combine the real and the imagined, and tell us yet another story.
Confections for verbs and nouns
Here we see the imagined universe of Babar's Dream by Jean de Brunhoff. In an archetypal battle between good and evil, the graceful winged elephants- the angels of kindness, intelligence, courage, patience, perseverance, knowledge, work, hope, love, health, joy, and happiness- drive out the demons of misfortune, anger, stupidity, discouragement, sickness, spinelessness, despair, fear, ignorance, cowardice, laziness.
Rather than simply being an inventory or parts list, the confection above portrays verbs as well as nouns.
Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1638) begins with a magnificent confection, a title page of ten compartments each corresponding to a numbered stazna in the prefatory poem "The Argument of the Frontispiece." The diagram shows how image and stanza are linked.
This design is a very special information display. The title page and accompanying poem reflect the book's argument, organization, and intellectual method. Moreover, the confectionary design of the title page reproduces the intellectual architecture of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Some confections represent subjects originating from a written text. Confectionary images representing texts are also notably enriched by the context (labels, captions, surrounding text) and by associations recollected by "instructed viewers."
The American artist Joseph Cornell
juxtaposes found objects in a grid of compartments. Cornell's boxes, miniature
theaters of reverie, assemble once separate
materials to create magical and cryptic architectures, three-dimensional
collages.
For art, collage combines images so as to create pleasing or provoking visual experiences, hardly expressible in words and rarely based on words; on the other hand, confections bring images together to display visual information, often expressible in words and often derived from words. Confections-makers cut, paste, construct, and manage miniature theaters of information - a cognitive art that serves to illustrate an argument, make a point, explain a task, show how something works, list possibilities, narrate a story.
*Information taken from Edward R Tufte's "Visual Explanation"