& Jan Fabre

Palais Royal-Salon des Glaces-Heaven of Delight

beetle encrusted ceiling and chandelier 

sculpture.org

& Maria Fernanda Cardoso

"Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s work is currently in the USF Contemporary Art Museum exhibition, “Homing Devices.” Cardoso’s “Garden Of Insects” was constructed of stick bugs, grasshoppers, and butterflies. Maria’s Garden is very convincing but unexpected as being constructed from insects that look like sticks and leafs. Maria purchased the butter flies and the grass hoppers, but she bred the stick bugs. As a minimalist Maria’s techniques are clean and flawless.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso comes from a Colombian culture. Maria’s work is influenced by her environment of mass graves that are full of dismembered bodies. The soil is very rich from the swampland and is know for growing potatoes. Maria uses panty hose filled with dirt linked together representing a combination of potatoes and dismembered body parts. Within the panty hose, Maria would plant grass seeds and document the growth. In other work Cardoso uses flowers to represent death because walls surrounding the graves were full of fresh flowers. She also uses reptiles from her child hood that relate to the crown of thorns and the terrorism she was exposed to day to day. I find it interesting that Maria grew up surrounded by death and continues to use dead insect corpses in her work today.
Maria’s Colombian roots are very pronounced in her work and she uses a variety of exotic materials from these roots. Golden gourd are found in tombs and are still in use today as bowls. Cardoso uses the gourds as sculptural elements. She also creates sculptures with brown soap that is traditionally made from fat and ashes. Maria said the smell in bad when using the soap but it is good for the skin. When Maria moved to Australia she used sheep skin and emus skin. Cardoso says there is a market for every thing and you can buy anything. Maria felt unconnected with the animals she chose to use in her work so she worked with a butcher to skin the animal herself. It’s expected for some one to kill animals for food but Cardoso is a vegetarian. I am uncertain of the use of the animals’ bodies but Maria expresses her interest in the texture and surface qualities of the emus’ skin that is representational of landscape. Maria encouraged others to touch her work to feel the dry grass qualities of the emus."
usfcritique.wordpress.com 

 mariafernandacardoso.com/ 

"“Characterised by the use of unconventional materials, Cardoso's work reveals her longstanding fascination with the natural world and the complexity of our relationship to it. Some of the works use the preserved bodies of frogs and lizards and dead butterflies, which are farmed for scientific and educational purposes. Others draw on dried sea creatures produced by the tourist industry as souvenirs of the seaside holiday, or in the case of the sea horses, are bred and used in Chinese medicine. These raw materials, with their potent symbolism, create works of great beauty, which recall patterns that exist in the natural world as well as minimalist sculpture, where simple elements are repeated to create more complex forms”.

 

& Tessa Farmer

Tessa Farmer is an artist based in London. Her miniscule sculptures are constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, and each of her figures stand barely 1cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass. Tessa’s tiny spectacles draw upon Victorian occultism, but they evolve further into something alien and futuristic. The worlds she creates are by no means twee, populated as they are by harnessed mayflies, battling honey bees, and malevolent spindly spiders.

tessafarmer.com/

& Decayed Book

The Decayed Book from Park Light Pictures on Vimeo.

"The pages have been reduced to the finest of laces. The light and texture create wonderful images within the paper and the text block." these books have become a micro environment within the natural world...
www.studio5bookbindingandarts.blogspot.com/

& moss house

moss house

Tokyo
Private House
2008.05

This project involved renovating an old wooden house on the Shibuya River in Tokyo's Ebisu neighbourhood into a live-work space. The house had accumulated some strange and wonderful features -an inner courtyard, an oddly long hallway, a tiny room- from a series of earlier renovations, so we decided to build on these earlier features, but also to "acclimate" the space to the new owner's lifestyle. The hallway became a study, and the small Japanese-style room a studio. Veins of moss pattern the riverbank outside the windows, so we used similar veins of dry moss on the interior walls to subtly connect existing spaces with newly-renovated ones, and the house's interior environment to its exterior one. Most wallpaper imitates nature through a two-dimensional representation of it, and cladding the walls entirely in moss would simply have been too much. We wanted something in-between, so we applied the moss in a pattern that looked like wallpaper, creating an ambiguous texture that's neither artificial nor natural. The same pattern appears on the cable outlet, and on the doorframes and door handles of the office, further synthesizing the moss pattern with the space.

nendo.jp

& harpers bazaar

Shot by fashion photographer Tim Walker and inspired by Tim Burton. This month's Harpers Bazaar introduces us a fun yet frightful side of fashion

& Singapore Garden Project

Grant Associates recently won an international design competition to plan the largest garden project ever to be constructed in Singapore, the Marina South Gardens. The structure, which is inspired by the shape of an orchid, features a group of cooled conservatories in its center as well as a series of enormous solar supertrees that provide the gardens with an abundant source of rain water and renewable energy.

Marina South Gardens is composed of a series of conservatories that show off tropical, Mediterranean and temperate species of plants and flowers. The project also contain a series of Supertrees, which are vertical gardens ranging in height from 25 to 50 meters. These structures power the cooled conservatories while serving as energy centers that house solar hot water heaters, solar panels, venting ducts, and rainwater harvesting systems. When not in use by visitors, the conservatories can play host to events and exhibitions.
The Marina’s themes of “Plants and Planet” and “Plants and People” round out the exhibit, providing visitors with a context for the sprawling garden center, which is expected to be completed by 2011.

inhabitat.com

& Gavin Harrison

Win Fame and Fortune' is a beautiful new giclee print taken from an original by Gavin Harrison.

The print has been produced on 310gsm Hahnemühle German Etching paper in a signed and numbered limited edition of just 50 prints.
While shopping at a Flea market in Spain Gavin found a treasure trove of old magazines. He snapped them up and after a few attempts arrived at this montage combining Spanish and very British images.
The format follows that of a magazine, images are torn away like pages to reveal the image beneath. In some strange surreal way all the different layers reveal images and words that seem to work and make sense in the way that montage does.

keepcalmgallery.com

& Brian Dettmer

flickr.com

designboom.com/

&trunk

TRUNK Volume One: HAIR
This strange anthology of writing and art explores the cultural, historical, religious and social aspects of the evolutionary ambiguous outgrowth of protein known as hair. It contains diverse pieces about: the monobrow, hair in medicine, Victorian mourning jewellery, Medusa, Aboriginal hair, hairdressing, transgender, the Brazilian, psychiatry, embroidery, dreadlocks, Rapunzel, chemotherapy, nightmares, magic, shaving, Mormon beards, women’s beards, order and chaos, brain damage and hair extensions.

Trunk books will be a series of small, corporeal, personal, and sensual books. They are intended to be beautiful, coveted objects filled with fascinating content, much like an old trunk in an attic. These collectable volumes will be consumable and engrossing as a whole, yet filled with short pieces so that each book can also be flipped through or dipped into at random. Each will explore a part of the human body through writing, art, and photography. There will be interviews, essays, fiction, photo essays, poems, and art works addressing multifarious dimensions of the theme. The series is aimed at an intelligent, engaged audience interested in both “high” and popular culture and is intended to have wide appeal.

$50/£25? buy via pay pal on their website

trunkbook.com