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.

Photo: Kibardin Design

Prague-based Russian designer Vadim Kibardin created the Deep Forest Lounge Chair out of 374 wooden dowels, carefully molded to seat a person comfortably. Each is custom-made and priced at $6,584. More pictures at the link.

Link via Gizmodo

“The format… was that of a box or casket, the raw materials for which were provided by the specimen itself, made up in the form of a book – varying in size from folio to duodecimo – with the ‘front cover’ forming a sliding lid…

For the left side of the ‘volume’ mature wood was selected and for the right side sapwood, while the fore-edge was made from heartwood; the top surface incorporated cross-sections from branches of various ages while the bottom surface showed a section through the trunk…

While the box itself served to illustrate the characteristics of the timber, the interior was reserved for an exposition of the whole natural history of the plant… a complete seedling is included to one side, with its roots, seminal capsule and first pair of leaves.  In the centre of the box the tip of a branch displays buds and leaves in various stages of development…blossoms are shown varying from full blooms to faded flowers, while fruits are similarly represented at every stage in their development… Examples of associated parasites and lichens are included…”

The empress Catherine tried to purchase Schildbach’s collection, but he deeded it to his master, Landgrave Wilhelm IX; it now resides in the Naturalienkabinett in Kassel, where it is still used as reference material.  Schildbach inspired several imitators, including Candid Huber, a Benedictine monk, whose collection survives in the Bavarian Burgmuseum.  Peter the Great eventually acquired a collection for his Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, and another resides in the Musee National des Techniques of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.

The cited text above is excerpted from Chapter IV (“Museums and the Natural World”) in Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, by Arthur MacGregor (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2007) – a comprehensive history of cabinets of curiosities, museums, and specialized collections.

Small-format photos of Schildbach’s collection are available at the webpage of the Naturkundemuseum in the Ottoneum at Kassel.  The embedded photo is from a similar Holzbuch in a collection at the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe.  Other examples may be seen here and here.  The creation of such “wooden books” seems to have been primarily a European endeavor; a related project by Romeyn B. Hough collecting North American woods in book form (using thin sections of wood attached to cardboard within a conventional book binding) was produced at the turn of the last century.

Artist and designer Anthony Roussel creates intricate jewelry from materials not usually associated with adornments – wood! This one above is a birch wood bangle – you can see more at his website: Link – via a+.29

To create the bone substitute, the scientists start with a block of wood — red oak, rattan and sipo work best — and heat it until all that remains is pure carbon, which is basically charcoal.

The scientists then spray calcium over the carbon, creating calcium carbide. Additional chemical and physical steps convert the calcium carbide into carbonated hydroxyapatite, which can then be implanted and serves as the artificial bone.

Link -via Digg

‘Scuse me while I pick up my jaw from the floor. That is a fully functional wooden Vespa, named "Vespa Daniela," made by Portuguese carpenter Carlos Alberto. Gawk here: Link – via Blog on a Toothpick

Kelly Ferrell uses a laser to cut these adorable mammoths, there are also t-rexes, butterflies and more. They seem quite hard to put together once you get them, but the result is quite worth it and is certain to attract attention from anyone who sees them.

Link Via Boing Boing

Mars Rover was rovin’ along the Red Planet where it snapped a picture of what looks like … a log of wood? The photo immediately a conspiracy theory rush in the blogosphere:

The unusual image was featured in a NASA press release in 2004, although the space agency made no mention of the timber-like object captured on the spacecraft’s 115th day on Mars.

But one website insists it is a leaked image that ‘could get someone killed.’ A writer from TheCrit.com said NASA’s claims Mars was a desert world were ‘lies’ and that ‘there are vast forests on Mars, ones that are kept from the public.’

They go on to speculate the ‘wood’ was brought to its present position by a flood of water that must have happened within 40 years ‘because the wood is intact.’

Link

This fantastic discovery, of course, is in a long list of strange objects (humanoid, skull, doorway, cave) already found.