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  • Girl swimming
    Girl swimming - Corwin Prescott
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    Reed Young - women in shop window
  • Get off the phone.
  • Titillating Tank Sculptures - Fan Xiaoyan's Half Woman-Half Machine Artwork (GALLERY)
    Sculptor Fan Xiaoyan has created several part woman, part metallic warrior pieces that I would not want to run into in a dark alley.
  • Jethro Haynes
    ‘The Amorous Octopus’ The one that started it all. First shoe diorama, with Hudson-Powell. Made for a Vans custom exhibition but never exhibited. Mixed materials on Uk size 8 Vans slip-on shoe. 2005

Cory Doctorow’s new novel Makers features some nice “On The Sprue” artwork on the cover. It reminds me ever so slightly of  the cover of The Blind Watchmaker.

 

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz are a pair of artists who express themselves through the medium of miniatures in snowglobes. Like Thomas Doyle much of their work is dark and surreal. Their work has been described as depicting the elaborate bleakness of an emotional icy desert, and indeed, most of the pairs globes feature snow and ice. Many of the scenes evoke a strong sense of foreboding or depict the aftermath of some tragedy with the unwitting participants stranded in an unforgiving wasteland.

Thomas Doyle creates snowglobes with fantastically dark and subversive themes. Take for example “Clearing” from his “Reclamations” series. In this wonderfully recursive and self-referential work, a person (ironically trapped in a snowglobe) encounters another person trapped within a smaller snowglobe and crying out for help. It is this interplay of the real and surreal that makes Doyle’s work so compelling. The miniature person in the outer snowglobe is clearly amazed and confounded at having discovered a person trapped in a snowglobe, though he himself is blissfully unaware of his own predicament.

Links:

• Interactive Storytelling Jewelry – Quirky Accessories That Tell a Story Each Time They’re Worn (GALLERY) – Interactive jewelry is a new concept found in the intriguing work of Allison Wells. Her pieces exercise elements of humor, play and interactivity.
• Miniature oranges from modelling clay – How to make highly realistic cut and peeled oranges from modelling clay. You can apply the same techniques to other items.
• Czech artist tells European Union to lighten up – Instead, he got together with his pals and made an eight-ton sculpture called “Entropia” that depicted Romania as a “Dracula theme park,” the Netherlands as being underwater “with only the tops of minarets sticking out,” Bulgaria “as a series of squat toilets,” Sweden as being “packed into an IKEA box” and so on.
• David Cerny – Sculptures – Kits – On-the-sprue art. A rock star, Jesus, The Artist and others as plastic model kits.
• Arts & Genomics :: VivoArts – This course will introduce students to issues and concepts relating to contemporary arts practices dealing with living biological systems (sometimes referred to as wet biology, art practice, Bioart, environmental art, body art, breeding practices). Emphasis is placed on developing critical thought, ethical issues and cross-disciplinary experimentation in art (art/science collaborations, art as research).
• DIYbio – DIYbio is an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.
• Dangerous Liaisons and other stories of transgenic pheasant embryology – we make money not art – If we are in the process of engaging in auto-evolution, then diversity, the inherent biological love of difference, implies that the human genome should be engineered with as wide a range of genre humans as there are art movements and swanky tastes in the world. Posthuman integrity is only guaranteed by an expanded aesthetics of anatomy, the more obscure the better… ! Let’s alter our identity as a species by birthing versions of ourselves into every permutative potential of fleshbound imagination.
• who killed bambi? » Blog Archive » Julia Murakami – Anatomy of a fairy tale by Julia Murakami.

Image Credit: © David Cerny

Since I’m fascinated by miniatures as art, I thought I’d do a small series of the artists and web-sites that I’m drawn to and try to explain (mostly for my own benefit) what it is I like about the work. Here’s part 1.

Little People – a tiny street art project- The artist started this project by posing miniature people in various public places around London, photographing them and then leaving them to fend for themselves. The images suggest a tiny parallel world that exists alongside our own and occasionally intersects with tragic or amusing consequences. In this world where the gigantic meets the tiny, a real world bee becomes a monster to be killed with a rifle, and a snail serves as public transport. Even though each image creates an atmosphere and stands alone in its own right, it’s easy to string these images together in your mind and imagine the entirely alternative miniature world exisiting alongside our own.

My personal favourites are the pictures from the Nuart Show, where an entire scene has been modelled in a gallery. I particularly like the scene of the accident where a framed (real-world-sized) picture has come crashing down into the world of the little people and one unfortunate victim has been impaled by a gigantic shard of glass.

Image Credit: © slickachu

McFly’s “Room On The Third Floor” video features the band members as injection-moulded plastic people still attached to the sprue. I like everything about the video – from the realistic looking “McFly w/Roadie & Fans” box to the animated assembly instructions. Watch the entire video on YouTube.

Disclaimer: When I said I liked everything about the video, I failed to mention that I’ve never actually watched the video with the sound on – I have no idea what these guys sound like.

All images copyright their respective copyright holders

Here’s another piece of On The Sprue Art. This one is a wall sculpture from Jellio “based on the sprue element the model parts were attached to” and which “pays tribute to the chrome-heavy hot rods of the fifties.” This piece is large enough that you can probably imagine cutting those components from the frame and pimping out your ride.

All images copyright their respective copyright holders

As a child I wondered why plastic model kits came attached to a frame at all; why they hadn’t been removed from the sprue; indeed why they didn’t arrive fully assembled. Whatever the reason, they left an impression on me and I’m still irrationally attracted to designs featuring injection-molded plastic model kits on the sprue. So much so, that I’ve decided to do a small series based on these designs. Part 1 (this post) is about the cover art of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. There seem to be many different covers for this book and some of them relate better to Dawkins’ ideas, but this is the only one that features a model kit on the sprue. The model seems to be two men, a dog, a book and possibly a lectern. I can’t work out what the connection is between the cover and the text – if anyone out there has some ideas, I’d love to hear them.

All images copyright their respective copyright holders