April, 2013
Nicole Absher
Nicole Absher is a very, very talented young artist who produces beautiful, stark, and highly detailed drawings that are dark and provocative, lush with torment made almost palpable by her gorgeous strokes, nightmarish visions mirroring self-image and the eerie lucidity of pain.
Tags: dark, hauntingly beautiful, nicole absher, realism, surreal horror
Witch Priestess Body Art
via the lovely plastickfreak
Tags: animal skulls, art nudes, body art, body painting, day of the dead, strange beauty, witch-priestess, witchhaus
Tim Walker’s “Dreaming of Another World”
Dreaming of Another World
+ Photographed by Tim Walker
for the March 2011 issue of Vogue Italia{via Haute Macabre – see the complete editorial there}
Tags: avant-garde goth, baroque, fashion editorial, hauntingly beautiful, high fashion, historically inspired, mystical, psychological horror
Anouk Wipprecht: The Merging of Technology and Fashion
Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch fashion designer who works in the emerging field of “fashionable technology,” defined by Sabine Seymour as “the intersection of fashion, design, science, and technology.” Anouk seeks to create a “higher state of connectivity between the body and our clothing,” a physical and psychological relationship wherein what we wear responds to us, and we are also affected by what we wear, producing something more than just the traditional function of coverture/adornment. What results is one-of-a-kind, architectural, avant-garde garments with bold silhouettes, vested with circuitry and a regalia of plastic tubes and the ability to respond in a unique and remarkable way to human bodies.
Picture via Coilhouse
The Birds, an installation piece inspired by the Hitchcock filmExamples of Anouk Wipprecht’s “wearable tech” include Fragilis, a dress that eerily mimics the function of the human heart and veins through motion and lighting (similar to the Heartbeat Dress, which conversely uses sound, recording the heartbeat of the model and relaying it to the audience through speakers embedded in the dress):
Daredroid, a dress that “combines pneumatic technology with open-source hardware and human temperament to provide you with a freshly made White Russian cocktail”:
And Intimacy (a project headed by Daan Roosegaarde), a set of garments that become more or less transparent and opaque in relation to their proximity to each other:
An interesting interview with Anouk can be read over on Fashioning Technology.
Tags: anatomical-themed, anouk wipprecht, avant-garde, bioart, biomechanical, fashiontech, fragility, futuristic, high fashion, wearable art, weird science projects, white
Demonic Visions and Sacred Images: The Art of Roberto Ferri
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, angels, art nudes, classicism, fleshy, photorealism, realism, religious imagery, renaissance, virtuoso
Unbearably Cute, Sweet, and Slightly Odd: The Art of Dilka Bear
Tags: animals, cute/creepy little girls, doll-like, fairy tales, historically inspired, pop surrealism, queens, sweet/melancholy, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, white hair
R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor
Tags: classic hollywood
“Biojewelry”: Grow Your Own Bone Wedding Rings
Several years ago, Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott, design researchers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College London, teamed up to create wedding bands from bone cells extracted from five volunteer couples.
According to a BBC News article, “The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.” After extracting the bone cells for culture, “These are fed with nutrients and grown on a ‘scaffold’ material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.” It was a “long and fragile” process, but basically took place in the following steps:
The process
1. Extract bone chips from jaw. Rinse.
2. Place bone cells in ring-shaped bioactive ceramic scaffold.
3. Feed liquid nutrients and culture in a temperature-controlled bioreactor for six weeks.
4. After coral-like bone forms fully around scaffold, pare down to final ring shape and insert silver liner (for engraving).Harriet Harriss, one of the participants, says: “I love the idea that it’s precious only to us because it is, literally, us. It’s almost worthless to anyone else. To take something that is from myself and make it into something precious is a lovely thing and means quite a lot to me.”
Of course, there is more potential for this project than just offbeat wedding rings made from the beloved’s own bone cells. It could eventually be used to grow bone replacements for implantation, so that the bone required to, say, repair a damaged jaw, wouldn’t have to be harvested from a piece of a rib, or elsewhere in the body. “Dr. Thompson says he thinks it will be used in clinical practice, but not in his lifetime.”
via goetia on Tumblr
Tags: anatomical-themed, bioart, biotechnology, bizarre, bones, jewelry, sinister arts and crafts, weird science projects
Gorgeous and Grotesque: The Art-Dolls of Nita Collins
Nita Collins’ doll-sculptures creep me out and exhilarate me. Disturbing, beautiful, verging on the grotesque, delicately crafted, flawlessly executed, melancholically tender, realistic to the point of being unnerving – adorned with puckered scars, ragged holes in chests, and a panoply of peculiar, unique marks on their flesh that seem to have come straight from Nita’s imagination and heart – the tortured, sweetly exquisite bodies and faces of these dolls are a singular, constant mixture of provocative and moving. They are lovingly scarred, divinely imagined, different from any other dolls I’ve seen. Nita Collins has a unique talent manifest in these gorgeous, poignant art-dolls. Check out her blog here.
Tags: bizarre, dark fairy tales, distorted bodies, dollflesh, dolls, emotive, expressive, hauntingly beautiful, nita collins, realism, scars, sculptures, strange beauty, sweet/melancholy, trauma, virtuoso, visceral
Ann Demeulemeester Fall 2011 RTW
These are my favorite looks from Ann Demeulemeester’s Fall 2011 Ready-to-Wear collection. Rugged, chic, and elegant, with lots of different textures and layers, this all-black collection channels fashion from after the apocalypse.
Tags: asymmetrical clothing, black jackets, corset lacing, high fashion, leather, runway fashion
