>>Olivier de Sagazan<<

These disturbing and grotesquely beautiful sculptures by Sarah Louise Davey are made of vividly, violently, luridly, fantastically painted ceramic, embodying creatures with bold, tortured, glazed stares, and strange growths either covering their eyes or framing them like sick, rotten petals of flesh carved out around an astonishingly open iris. It is unnerving and startling, garish and obscene, and yet has a delicate and whimsical touch, and is quite beautiful. They appear simultaneously textured and not, curiously both 3D and 2D – they look like paintings on porcelain, and the bold, dark lines sketching their features out against the chalky whiteness of the ceramic hold a horrific and fascinating quality.

Also check out:
Gorgeous and Grotesque: The Art Dolls of Nita Collins

Karl Persson uses a glossy realism to depict horrific themes and evoke the un-plumbable depths of pain, madness, and misery.

Almost nothing is known about the story except this: you explore the sprawling, intricate, nearly opulent-looking Hanwell Mental Institute, and the horrors that the inmates underwent. The main character is an ex-patient who has returned to the asylum “to understand why he is suffering from bizarre hallucinations.”

There’s a lot of focus on the actual exploration of the building – as creator Agustín Cordes claims, “Each single room matters and even the bathrooms are brimming with details,” and “The overall consensus is that exploring the Hanwell building feels eerily realistic and is filled with ‘touchably crisp textures.’” About the premise, “I will only say this: Asylum is supposed to feel surreal, like there’s something horribly wrong going on inside Hanwell as soon as you set foot inside the place. Don’t try to make any sense out of it, at least not until you’re halfway into the game.”

More words from the creator:
An aspect that has become very apparent during our testing is that Asylum, unlike most first-person adventures, is really fluid. There are virtually no loading times, control is quick and smooth, navigation is easy, you have an amazing deal of freedom of movement — all in all, everything feels just right. At times it feels like a first-person shooter actually, which is pretty cool if you ask me — after all, adventures should test your creativity and intuition, not your patience with the controls. In this regard I believe that we have definitely achieved our goal because Asylum feels, in one word, “modern.”

I love anything to do with old insane asylums, especially in the context of horror, and if the teaser (showing the decayed and sinister corridors of the institute, and cells in which inmates are suffering in horrific, bloody ways) is anything to go by, this should be interesting and imagination-piquing.

A gameplay trailer was released last month, which is quite amazing.

>>Kikyz Ferrer<<

via Same Hat!

Also check out Suzanne’s fabulous chest-piece based on an artwork by Vania Zouravliov.

Related posts:
Jessica Harrison’s “Breaking” Series

Further delight yourself by viewing this video, inspired by “the cinepoems of Man Ray and jarring aspects of psychological horror”:

via Haute Macabre

>>Fuyuko Matsui<<

{Nicole Absher’s blog}