Emily Berezin made a woman from eleven loaves of Wonder® Bread and the bags they came in. The result is, of course, Wonder® Woman! See more pictures in her Flickr set.
When I die and become Saint Neatorama, I’d like sculptor Al Farrow to make me a reliquary to treasure one of my body parts. Presumably my blogging pinkie. Al has made some 40 unusual reliquaries, mausoleums and monuments out of guns and ammo parts, dedicated to preserving the body parts of fictional saints.
Although this wood sculpture looks basic enough, it’s actually quite remarkable. You see, artist Ron van der Ende creates works like this out of found wood – and makes bas relief sculptures. So while you’re correct in deducing the width and height, the depth is only a few centimeters.
Inspired by working in his father’s woodshop as a young man, Ron went to art school where he studied painting. Dissatisfied and longing for working with wood again, he opted for sculpting, and soon found a knack for off-beat bas relief.
I collect old doors and stuff. Old painted wood that I find in the street. I take it apart and skin it to obtain a 3mm thick veneer with the old paint layers still intact. I construct bas-reliefs that I cover with these veneers much like a constructed mosaic. I do not paint them!
This one took me a while just to figure out what I was looking at!
Link to Interview on diskursdisko. Ron’s website. via The Donut Project.
In 2003, Wake Forest University students Nazila Alimohammadi and Anna Clark built this picnic table in the shape of the periodic table of elements. From a campus newspaper:
The two women students created the sculpture as part of a public art course taught in the fall by David Finn, associate professor of art. Students in the class were paired up and assigned to work with campus organizations in creating works for public display. “We wanted our project to be fun and functional without a lot of emotional or political content,” Clark says. An aspiring dentist, Alimohammadi had taken several chemistry classes and suggested working with that department. They devised their “Periodic Table” concept — a pun of the familiar Periodic Table of Elements configuration — and the department responded enthusiastically. Alimohammadi did the structural steel work and Clark hand-painted the surface tiles. The piece, which was dedicated in an informal picnic ceremony on April 15, is accurate in every detail, right down to the auxiliary lanthanides and actinides tables that constitute the table’s bench.
If you took a look at the larger version of this sculpture (left), you’d immediately conclude that it was made out of Styrofoam. As impressive as that would be, the real mind-blower here is that it’s actually marble.
All of Fabio Viale’s creations from marble have a deceptive quality to them, prompting the beholder to utter “No way,” with each new sculpture. From paper airplanes, to actual working boats, to classic renderings of the human form, they all inspire.
For instance, these seemingly impossible tires linked together? Black marble.
deviantArt user ~toge-nyc created this dragon out of plastic forks, spoons, and knives held together with glue. It took him about 80 hours complete the project. If you check out his page, you can also see some pretty cool pen-and-ink drawings.
Victoria’s Way Indian Sculpture Park is home to over 14 amazing pieces respresenting the spiritual progression to enlightenment. These statues were created by craftsmen in Mahabalipuram, India. I love the fact this amazing Indian Sculpture based is in County Wicklow, Ireland! The results speak for themselves.
Here comes October, which means it’s close to pumpkin carving time. But if you’re reluctant to let go of summer, head on over to Takashi Itoh’s and check out some wonderful watermelon carvings. Takashi says it only took him three weeks to become skilled at it.
Artist Luke Jarram has created glass sculptures of some of the deadliest diseases known to man including HIV, E. Coli and Small Pox. The incredibly intrincate sculptures challenge both the state of the art in glass sculpting and the ability of scientists to visualize these diseases. For instance scientists are unable to describe to Jarram how RNA is situated in the Capsid.
Jarram’s website includes a video showing how he uses glass blowing techniques to create the sculptures. The video shows him working on the HIV sculpture.
Dutch artist Peter Jansen creates polyamide and bronze sculptures that look like a split second in time. They don’t actually move, but they look like they are in motion. Perhaps appropriately, he started out as a physics student rather than as an artist.
Every breed of art deserves at least a short moment in the limelight. Microsculpting, however, deserves quite a bit more. Taking up to six weeks on a single piece, microsculpter Willard Wigan creates miniature versions of pop culture icons that must be viewed from a microscope. Wired Magazine shares this incredible story:
“I’m like a mad professor, but without the spiky hair,” laughs Wigan, 52, who spends about six weeks on each piece. “I get down to 6, 7 microns, which is one-third the size of a period you’d see in a newspaper.”
“I cut the joints of this nylon fiber and moved the arm toward its head, but as I bend it, the arm keeps wanting to spring back,” he says, describing the delicate process. “I’m making little grooves, and as I’m cutting, the body starts to bend and twist and by then, perspiration starts dripping off my finger down the tool and toward the sculpture, like a little tidal wave of sweat coming down.”
Artist Junior Fritz Jacquet crumples and folds toilet paper rolls until they make faces displaying anguish, happiness, disgust and more. Once they’re folded right, he adds just a bit of color to help bring out their color and then they’re ready to go.
Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley brought the bottle city of Kandor from the Superman comic series to life. If you don’t know, Kandor is a Kryptonian city miniaturized by Brainiac and kept in a bottle by Superman:
The exhibition of new works by Mike Kelley at the Jablonka Galerie features sculptures, lenticular lightboxes, and videos related to the fictional city of Kandor, the capitol of Superman’s home planet Krypton. According to the Superman mythos, Kandor is the only remaining vestige of the exploded Krypton, and the city is preserved, in a reduced state, in a bottle in Superman’s possession. Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance. In this exhibition Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle, which, despite obvious differences, purport to depict the same city.
John Struan over at Super Punch has more pics and a video clip from the
exhibit: Link – Thanks John!
Sander van Heukelom combines typographic design, graffiti and sculpting into unique pieces of 3D graffiti (He uses styrofoam, plexiglass, synthetic resin and wood).
This one above, Quod dubitas, ne feceris – Latin for "when you doubt, do not act" – is probably a concept most graffiti artists do not recognize.
Check out the rest of Sander’s artwork here: Link [Flash] – via Rue The Day!
The Chrysanthemum is a centerpiece designed by South African designer Michaella Janse van Vuuren. It’s a combination of bowl/candle holder made with rapid prototyping (and manufacturing) using laser, so it’s a perfect combination of art and engineering:
The centrepiece reflects my passion for the textures, shapes and patterns found in nature. I especially like to interpret those objects that have a repetitive mathematically founded pattern. Some objects are immediately recognisable, such as the Chrysanthemum, others are more abstract. Direct 3-dimensional manufacturing methods, such as selective laser sintering (SLS) used to create the Chrysanthemum allows me to design intricate textures and objects. These textures and objects would have been impossible to execute by hand, yet the centrepiece still retains the beauty and tactile feeling of a natural object.
The Chrysanthemum is directly manufactured with the EOS P380 using the PA2200 polyamide material.
Louise Hibbert works with wood and Sarah Parker-Eaton works with silver and gold. Separately and together, they create art inspired by microscopic plankton from the oceans.
Patterns and form in nature have inspired artists and designers throughout history. The microscopic drifting organisms that populate the oceans and great lakes, the plankton, are subject to very different physical forces to those that develop shape and form in larger organisms such as alleviaton of gravity. As a consequence they have developed unique forms, architectures, kinetics and complex symmetries uncommon in larger and terrestrial forms.
Charlie Bucket, created this beautiful sculpture where the intricate weaving with the use of colored fluids and what I believe to be bubbles/air pockets produce a hypnotic effect. Apparently, this is just a small prototype to what I hope is going to be a giant monster of an art piece that he’ll have at the 2009 Maker Faire in San Mateo.
* I highly suggest to check out the HD version of this on Vimeo.
**And I think a sound warning is needed as TronStuck has suggested. Especially, for those of you wearing headphones.
We all know about Mount Rushmore and the Great Sphinx of Giza, both carved in situ without the intention of ever being moved. Such sculptures are often referred to as living rock. Others, like these, are not so well known. From places you may expect to find them, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia to the far flung reaches of Ethiopia and Bangladesh, most were carved in ancient times. In almost all cases there are no extant records which explain how they were built without the aid of modern technology. Yet here they are.
Quazen blog has a list of 9 incredible architectures sculpted out of rocks:
China has many a Buddha dotted throughout its extraordinary landscapes but the Giant Buddha of Leshan is unique in that it was carved directly out of the cliff face – just look at the people at the feet of the statue. The sculpture, which is seventy one meters (or over three hundred feet) tall dwarfs the tourists that flock to see it. It is positioned so that it faces Mount Emei and stands at the meeting place of three rivers. Although the Government of China has promised a restoration program, the statue has suffered from the effects of pollution, particularly over the last twenty years. Fortunately, the statue was not damaged in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.
Don’t ask me how Allen and Patty Eckman did it, but they have a special process that lets you create detailed sculptures out of cast paper:
Cast paper sculpture has been around since the 1950’s but should not be confused with papier-mache’. The two mediums are completely different. The artists first mix an acid free paper pulp in the studio hydro-pulper
from two raw stocks, cotton and abica. Then the pulp is cast into molds which were made from original clay sculptures. The paper is then pressed under vacuum pressure or by hand in the mold where most of the water is extracted at the same time. The drying process is completed by evaporation while the paper is still in the mold. After the dry and hard casts are removed from the molds the exclusive process of chasing, cast additions, cast alterations, sculpting in paper and detailing begins. It takes a great amount of time and experience to create each piece. Some works are so painstakingly detailed they can take many months to complete.
Suffice it to say, their artwork are fantastic: Link – via CrookedBrains
This is some incredible artwork by Hilary Berseth, and a few thousand helpers…
Artists from Rodin to Warhol to Mark Kostabi have outsourced the construction of their work. Hilary Berseth goes them one better: He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job. “I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”
Forget the clunky and boxy prototypical robot we see in bad Sci-Fi movies all the time!
Behold The Rise of Discord, the sleek and sexy mechanical representation of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and discord by Greg Brotherton of Brotron. Check out the rest of his sculptures here: Link – via Musecrack
Photo via Artnet, auctioned by Sotheby’s New York from the Estate of Cecile Singer
Actually, that’s An Important and Unique Cat, a marble sculpture by Swiss sculptor Edouard-Marcel Sandoz, an artist of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movement. But I couldn’t resist pointing out the similarities to the Dark Knight – via The Zeray Gazette
In 1976, Patricia Renick created this awesome sculpture of the dinosaur Triceratop out of real helicopter parts:
Completed in 1976 as the Vietnam war wound down, it serves largely as a plea for the extinction of military technology. 30 feet long, the fearsome sculpture combines life sized helicopter and Triceratops parts, featuring genuine blades and weapons. [...]
Triceracopter could be placed in multiple traditions. It is a form of social commentary on killing machines and an expression of hope for the end of warfare. There are many artists who are working with the idea of bio-mechanical forms, juxtapositions and transformations.
That’s "I See What You Mean," a 40-foot tall blue bear peering into the window of the Colorado Convention Center. The steel and fiberglass sculpture is created by Lawrence Argent:
The artist has described I See What You Mean as a stylized representation of native fauna. As the bear peeks inside the enormous facility at the conventioneers, displacement and wonder pique curiosity and question a greater relationship of art, technology and whimsy.
Nerdbots are robot sculptures created with found objects. Married couple Nicholas and Angela create Nerdbots by piecing together parts found at their favorite antique and thrift stores.
See what happens when a bunch of students have some free time and a lot of snow?
This image is a 5′ sculpture made out of snow. In March of 2003, there was a huge blizzard in Denver and school was canceled for an entire week. With nothing else to do and artistic frustration to get out, my cousins, brother, sister, and I decided to sculpt an enormous face in the packed snow. I hope you post this work of art – I personally think it’s awesome
Lenny&Meriel make these delightful figures they call Sparebots out of resistors, caps, pots, chips, sockets, and other electronic parts! Some are arranged into little scenes, and some are animals. Link to Flickr set. Link to Lenny’s blog. -Thanks, Joe!
If you saw this on the beach, you’d probably want to set up camp some distance away. But this beached sperm whale is made of wood, aluminum and polyester! The sculpture is at Scheveningen Beach in The Netherlands. See this and four other creepy beach installations. Link -via Geek Like Me
Rotterdam artist Bert Simons creates realistic sculpture portraits made of paper! See more in his portfolio, including sculptures of some European celebrities. Link-Thanks, Stephen Douge!
It’s not unusual for artists to use crayons to create their artwork, but Herb Williams use them in a different way: he creates whimsical sculptures out of crayon sticks! Link
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