Bay Area sculptor Gay Outlaw has created artworks with puff pastry and caramel, and built a 30-foot-long wall of fruitcakes that she baked herself.

Fortunately for those of us who, at this time of year, seem to gain ounces and pounds just looking at baked goods, Outlaw has turned away from edible materials in recent years.

Her current show, extended through Jan. 12 in the Gatehouse Gallery at Napa’s di Rosa Preserve, includes colorful sculptures in blown glass, vinyl, wood, paper and corrugated plastic.

For the piece “Tear,” Outlaw even sacrificed her camping mattress, cutting its blue chambered pad into scraps to line dozens of rippling glass forms, each wrapped in dyed vinyl, that compose a teardrop shape displayed directly on the gallery floor.

“If it’s on a platform, you’re one degree removed — or maybe more than one degree — from experiencing it,” Outlaw told an audience of about 50 art lovers at the di Rosa Preserve last month.

Besides, “I’m kind of like a kid — I’d rather work right on the floor,” she added with a smile.

Floor work of another kind inspired her “Three-Legged Intersection,” with its angled, pierced plywood limbs: “I did yoga for a while,” Outlaw said.

On loan by the artist from San Francisco’s Gallery Paule Anglim, all of the pieces in Outlaw’s di Rosa show were created in 2007, although the largest — “For Sale By Owner,” a six-foot zig-zag of corrugated plastic honeycombed with thousands of holes lined in Day-Glo pink — was started last year.

Outlaw described her current show as “mid-scale,” with “relationships that you can’t quite put your finger on, between pieces.”

An emerging career

Outlaw discovered her career as a sculptor gradually: She first earned a French degree at the University of Virginia, and then trained at La Varenne cooking school in France and the International Center of Photography in New York before moving west.

“Soon after arriving in San Francisco, I started to photograph objects — to my great relief,” said Outlaw, who had spent her first years as a photographer working in self-portraits.

“After a couple of years of that, I realized I wanted to make objects.”

From ephemeral beginnings — puff-pastry installations on a library shelf, illustrating “the fragility of human knowledge,” and caramel planks that melted — Outlaw worked her way toward larger pieces like the serpentine, aluminum-clad wall of fruitcake she created for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the installation of huge blocks of caramel bouncing on springs that was featured in Copia’s opening exhibition in 2001.

The partially melted Copia piece was destroyed, per the artist’s instructions, after the close of the exhibition. After a two-year installation at Yerba Buena, Outaw moved the fruitcake wall in 1997 to the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside where, nibbled by wildlife and weathered by the elements, it gradually returned to nature.

Since the late 1990s, she has worked in what di Rosa Preserve curator Michael Schwager called “more permanent — and less edible — materials,” often creating forms inspired by nature or by everyday objects like children’s blocks (her “Perforated Blocks” and “Camo Cubes” series).

Within those forms, Outlaw explores “volume and surface, interior and exterior,” in Schwager’s words, by piercing surfaces to show inner details or building solid-seeming shapes from hollow PVC pipe and tubing.

“I’m big friends with the guys at the hardware store,” said Outlaw, who ordered a mile of dishwasher drain hose for one of her larger projects.

The sculptor returned to photography for one work in the di Rosa show: “36 Gay Outlaws” plays on both her reputation and the fact that, like the “boy named Sue” made famous by Johnny Cash, she has gone through life with a name that gets your attention — for good or ill.

“I’ve always thought my name was a blessing and a curse as far as my art career goes, because people do remember it,” she told an audience of about 50 art lovers at the di Rosa Preserve last month.

Some, however, find in her name “a lot of associations that, when they come to the work, are confused,” continued Outlaw, whose voice still carries a hint of accent from her native Alabama.

“What I’ve realized lately, and I’ve come to embrace, is that my name has a life of its own that really doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

To prove it, the print “36 Gay Outlaws” shows three dozen snapshots of art students at a costume party, dressing the theme “Gay Outlaw.”

It’s an unusual, occasionally hilarious self-portrait, but somehow one that fits this good-humored and energetic creator.

The di Rosa Preserve announced this week that “Gay Outlaw: Recent Work” has been extended an extra week, through Jan. 12; admission to the Gatehouse Gallery is free Tuesdays through Fridays from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the gift shop is worth a visit for art- and nature-themed stocking stuffers.

For more information: www.dirosapreserve.org or 707-226-5991 x25.