The Crown of Thorns Cilice Ring was inspired by the centuries-old Catholic practice of using a cilice belt, a spiked metal chain (usually worn around the thigh) which reminds the wearer of Jesus’ sacrifice through physical suffering and corporal mortification. As Thomasin says, “It’s pretty uncomfortable, yet I can’t seem to stop trying it on.” Interestingly enough, contemporary versions of cilice belts can be purchased online.

This ring is made out of shibuchi, an alloy of silver and copper, and etched with a fish skeleton pattern.

Repulso is what looks like a superhero cockroach. It is a real cockroach (killed by her cat), donning a blue cape, mounted on a band. I love this ring because it is so exceedingly odd and quirky, and makes something that is commonly viewed as a disgusting, vile household vermin, fit only for swift death, into a piece of art.

Some of Thomasin’s pieces truly push the boundaries of wearability and function in jewelry, including (below) Bad Girl Button Ring, wherein when a copper button is pushed, a steel spike stabs the wearer in the finger, and Temptation, which features a plug adapter that plugs into wall sockets.

Be sure to check out Thomasin Durgin’s inspiring blog.

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

Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.

1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.

Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.

The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.

This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.

The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.

Black and Blue is a sculpture piece by Emily Kaelin, resembling a disembodied clump of long black hair ethereally embedded with bright blue butterfly wings, also severed from their proper owners. It is made of synthetic hair, Morpho butterfly wings, and glitter.

Emily Kaelin is a young artist who constantly deals with repulsion vs. beauty, in installations, mixed-media art, and paintings, mimicking human organic materials that are generally thought to be disgusting, such as flesh, hair, blood, and bone, and creating pieces that are conflicting, visceral, and unlike anything else out there, pushing her art farther and into new territories.

She describes her own art in these words: “push and pull of appealing and repellent, comforting and upsetting, lovely and ugly; inability to look at or render self objectively; impulse and intuition and instinct; emotionality; flesh; hairiness”

Her art constantly intersects the descriptors of ugly, strangely beautiful, alluring, repulsive, bizarre, off-putting, interesting, intriguing, fleshy, raw, delicate, otherworldly, and original. It expresses agony incarnate in the body, in its materials of ink and parchment (blood and skin).

A few more examples of her work below:

I want to explore how our thoughts, feelings, experiences, and pains are housed in our bodies; how our bodies act as a sort of lens, filter, protection, and reflection of everything that is housed within.

Often I depict emotional pain using imagery that suggests physical bodily harm. Dripping paint, flesh colored wax, gauze-like cheesecloth, raw meat, matted and tangled hair, and needles are all materials I have used to achieve this effect. These seemingly grotesque items are almost always combined with delicate mark-making, inviting colors, elements of adornment such as seed pearls, glitter, and lace, intricate decorative details, or other reassuring elements that create work that seeks to be both compelling and repellent.
– Emily Kaelin

Also be sure to check out her journal and blog, aptly titled My Filthy Excess.

Read an interesting interview with Daikichi Amano over on Don’t Panic.

As Shimoda explains in her artist’s statement, “Contrasting with my daily cheerful demeanor, my unexpressed emotions accumulate inside of me. I feel like an outsider, isolated, lost, and have a hard time building relationships with others, but I never give up being part of the world. The secret to survival? Observe, feel, and listen to yourself. I stand in front of my canvas and confront it, releasing all the built-up unverbalized emotions, the chaos, and the unnoticeable darkness. Even though I know my contrasting side will be shone in the light with no place to hide, I paint to live and to be connected in this world. I accept and understand myself more through my artistic processes than anything else. As I know myself more, I can see others better.

My motif is mainly children. They are nobody, and yet, they could be somebody. They could be me as a small child, or they could be somebody’s inner child. Children, as ambiguous of an existence as they are, reflect my personal world and the universal problems that society today has.”