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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

Detailed and realistic, these pieces make loud and piercing statements about the troubled relationship between man and the natural world, but remain elegant and delicate. They “borrow from myth” (one example is this piece, titled Persephone, which references the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades to the Underworld, in which she mistakenly eats the seeds of a pomegranate he offers to her, thus forcing her to spend a quarter of each year in the Underworld – in MacDowell’s vision, the pomegranate’s seeds are actually pills, tablets with a neat little line down the middle); other sources of inspiration include “art history, figures of speech, and other cultural touchstones.”

The pieces are visual metaphors, or illustrated “figures of speech,” such as a pair of lungs with canaries inside them, or a dead rabbit containing a human skeleton. In MacDowell’s world, man and nature are grafted to each other, repeatedly, in surreal and subtly horrific ways. As she explains, often “aspects of the human figure stand in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.”

Check out her work below, and be amazed. More can be seen on her Website.

I was super obsessed with Sandman in high school. It was kind of an epiphany for me. It was and still is the most profound, intellectually and visually interesting, artistic, and endearing thing in the comic book world that I’ve ever found. My favorite members of the Endless are Dream, Death, and Delirium; I see myself in each of them. I hope that they find actors who somewhat fit the roles for the Endless. I particularly think it’s important that they find an actress who suits my idea of what Death should look like, for some reason.

My Victoriandustrial rock idol Emilie Autumn recently did an interview with Planet Green. I thought her answer to the last question, advice on “how to make more green, compassionate, and creative choices,” was most pertinent, as it’s totally the way I see it, too:

I would suggest that the element that would help the most in keeping our planet green is to learn to appreciate the beauty and importance of what it is that we have, similar to my view of vegetarianism and converting people to that way of eating. It is much more effective, and far less annoying, to increase people’s appreciation for animals of all species than it is to tell people not to eat them. A dietary alteration will soon follow once the animals in question are seen as something more important than food. We need to teach people to fall in love with the natural world again before we can expect them to care about saving it.

Also, here’s a behind-the-scenes video from Emilie’s photoshoot for Bizarre Magazine – with rats! (Don’t mind the God-awful porn lounge-type music they always accompany their videos with, it’s so ridiculous):
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