knitted human hair sculptures by chrystl rijkeboer

"Where people are, there are emotions. Where emotions are, I find my subjects. My working material is litteral direct taken from the human. Just as the emotions. Material and subject are the base for my work.
The reason I work with human hair, is that hair has symbolic significance: beauty, strength, health, attraction, etc. The moment it is separated from the human all these factors turn around, hair is considered dirty, unsavory and dead.
Human hair is a hyper-individual material, which I felt or spin into yarn.
The objects and installation I create are divided between soft, touchable and an anxious distance. The tension that arises is highly dominated by the impact of the material. The work is figurative and recognizable but shape and proportions are not necessarily correct or ‘beautiful’, what matter is the sensation they evoke. You can always view my work in two ways: kind, pleasant and innocent, or frightening, condemning and guilty." - chrystl rijkeboer

..hmm i wonder if my boyfriend would be happy if i cut my hair off and used it to knit him a funky hat?

teeth

i don't really know what this blog post is about, except it revolves around a photo i snapped of an ad for an art show in an old magazine.


i've tried to look up what the art show was about, but it doesn't seem as interesting to me as the ad. i just like teeth and bones and all sorts that has to do with the body. i like how this weird sculpture combines manky human remains with silvery jewellryness - like a type of unwearable occult piece of jewellry. i wish i had loads of teeth to make scary jewellery of! (oh wait, I DO, i just have to get them out somehow.. )

taxidermy art by polly morgan

polly morgan's work is the super-coolest. she works with taxidermy, but not in the traditional way where the taxidermist tries to re-create nature/reality. polly morgan creates a fantasy, brought to life with the bodies of real animals. and i find it completely beautiful, serene and melancholic.

"Morgan won't call herself a taxidermist. 'I'm nowhere near as competent as the taxidermists I've learnt from,' she says insistently. Plus her ambitions are quite different. 'What [taxidermists] are trying to do is to recreate a wildlife image in 3D, a classic pose, something you'd see in the countryside. I am more interested in the moment between something dying and decaying - anything between a few hours and a week. There's something beautiful about that. The wings aren't used for flying, the eyes aren't used for seeing, the beak isn't used for pecking… it just becomes an ornament. When it's taken out of context, people can see that it's beautiful. They can appreciate it for what it is.'" link

i love animals. and death fascinates me. as i've said before, i'm not fascinated by violent death, by gore, i'm fascinated by peaceful death - the mysery that is important to understanding life. i've always wanted a taxidermy animal (i've got one now, from etsy of all things, but more on that later), i can see how it might be deemed a tasteless wish by some. i'm not a hunter, i don't want to show off my "prey" as a proof of my hunting skills- but doing so is maybe more acceptable than wanting a taxidermy animal because of a fascination of death.

i think taxidermy can be dignified as much as it can be tasteless, and in polly morgans case i find that it's totally dignified. she doesn't kill any animals for her work, it is all road kill and such. she doesn't portray them in a humiliating way. her work is all about the beauty - and melancholy - of mortality.

rubber & resin sculptures by jeanne silverthorne

oh my goth, these are so cool and dark and i love love love old dysfuntional electric stuff. i've done drawings of old electric leads, lamps etc, but it looks so much better (and darker) as rubber sculptures.

sensual dolls by marina bychkova

aahh marina bychkova is such a talented doll artist. i have a special interest in dolls. i guess i'm a bit childish, i like toys and miniatures, but that's not all there's to it. i find the body, being a body, being a person really interesting. i find it interesting that humans keep making copies of themselves in the shape of dolls. a human is thought and body, the doll is a strange copy as it is devoid of thought; it is only body. to me, it is a disturbing copy; the human all objectified. i don't think it's a negative copy though; anything that is disturbing makes me question things, and questioning things isn't negative. also, marina's dolls are really pretty, it makes questioning things more fun. another thing is that the body being "objectified" sort of gives off sexual associations, which makes it even more fun to question things.







michael jackson!! :
this doll kind of looks like me from the back, when i used to henna my hair. maybe because my hair was the same length and equally brittle and damaged, like doll's hair:









i've been kind enough to enlarge certain ereas for all my readers. i love how marina bychkova doesn't make sexless barbie crotches, but makes her dolls more sensual, with pink nipples, detailed private bits etc. it looks amazing on most of her dolls, but upon seeing this picture i had to laugh out loud. i showed a similar photo of the doll on the left to my boyfriend, and he exclaimed "oh my god, her pussy looks like the mouth of a dog!!"
i don't think it has anything to do with their pussies being detailed or hairy, i think it's more of a fact that the dolls are ball jointed and it's hard to make things look ok in all positions - when the dolls stand up, their vaginas is sort of situated flat on the stomach. maybe it looks more normal when the doll is sitting down. i love this picture of them standing up though, i think dog mouth pussies is funny for girls with such beautiful, dignified faces.

check out marina bychkova's website for more amazing dolls.

octopussy by rune olsen

he's not the first artist to cover the theme of ladies amusing themselves with tentacle goodness, and i'd be very surprised if he was the last. and also very disappointed. not that i'm into tentacles, but i think it makes for cool art. i might have to post other art on this theme, but for now i just want to share this amazing sculpture by rune olsen.

i can't help the way i feel

soooo here we go again.. macabre art on The Body, the strange object that we can not avoid having an experience of. i think the body is one of the more confusing objects there is, as it is both meat and self, and it is hard to have an objective view on it. especially on ones own. this is the work of john isaacs called "i can't help the way i feel". it is designed to show how an obese person might perceive themselves. it reminds me about understanding joshua by charlie white, where charlie white used a miserable looking puppet to portray how a person with a very low self esteem might view themselves.



i showed this blog entry to my boyfriend, he was amazed, mostly as he thought this was an actual real person. so i realized i should mention that this is but a sculpture, and i've found a couple of photos that show the whole thing:

pork flesh vagina sculptures by geza szollosi

this art is mainly about the body. the artist wanted to depict the body as true to the original as possible, and to achieve that, he used pork flesh. clever.
obviously the pork flesh he is using has to be dead prior to sculpting, and as a result, the sculptures seem more like corpses than live bodies. something that also enhance this quality about the work is how the bodies are brutally stitched up and divided into parts. the artist, being a man, has chosen women as his subjects, and it comes as no surprise what sort of "parts" of them he has chosen for the base of his work.




as if showing pork flesh vaginas isn't enough, he then gets intimate with his flesh creations. associations of women seen as meat and objects comes to mind (not to mention necrophilia):




i didn't intend to sound this negative about his work, i actually really LIKE it. i think it's ace how he has created these sculptures, and it really says something dark about the body and mortality.

it's just that in our society, the body is always female, and the eye that sees belongs to a man.
unless it's a male body being seen by a homosexual man. this is nearly the only case where a male body is objectified. if you see porn with cocks and naked men, or even art with naked men, it is nearly always labeled "homosexual".

i have this book on the male body, and when looking at it, it's like i see it through the eyes of a homosexual man. it's not that strange; it's probably been published for homosexual men, and all the photographs are taken by homosexual men.

i want to claim the right for women not to see through the eyes of a man, but through their own, and have what they see aknowledged by all as equally important.

there's nothing wrong with the body being an object, it's an aspect of it's existence. but i don't like the notion of female bodies (and thus myself) as MORE of an object, closer to nature and animal, than the male body.
i refuse to identify with these flesh sculptures as they remind me of this absurd untruth.

i have seen this artist in two of my favourite blogs, unscathed corpse and morbid anatomy, and have been wanting to write about him for quite a while as i found his work absolutely fascinating. i didn't think i'd end up with such a gender issue rant. it's not the artist, but society as a whole that bothers me, and i see the symptoms of it in everything, even in things that i truly like, as geza szollosi's art.

here is a photo from his "betelguese projects". it looks like an elf preserved in formaldehyde! :


check out the artist's website for more of his work.

dark adorable clay creatures

I've looked at clay stuff today as I'm sculpting a polymer clay elf and wanted some inspiration.

Here is the work of a guy called Scott Radke.






Check out his flickr account for more of his work.