nature and its elements to depict the reality of dreams

magpie & whiskeyjack have previously featured the art of wearing an animal on one's head and the art of wearing a full wunderkammer on one's head, but via but it does float we find that Albín Brunovský (1935-1997) made full microcosms, forests, seas and legends worn on the head which pre-date and perhaps outdo all of the above.


lbín Brunovský / Albin Brunovsky
Lady Godiva - Dáma v klobouku VI. / Lady in the Hat VI.
lept, suchá jehla, mezzotinta
etching, dry-point, mezzotint
1981, 11.5 x 16 cm,
opus 490

You must agree, that's some hat.













Albín Brunovský was a Slovak painter, printmaker, graphic artist, illustrator and professor. He designed banknotes for Czechoslovakia and is considered one of the greatest Slovak painters of the 20th century. You can find more of his art here or in the Journey Around My Skull archives.

Machine Music

Mix your analogue with your digital. See what can be done with vintage (low) technology and a microcontroller:

Sewing Machine Orchestra from Martin Messier on Vimeo.

Montreal-based composer, performer and video artist Martin Messier makes music with 8 (amplified) sewing machines. Samuel St-Aubin has interfaced them to the microcontroller so that the machines themselves control sound parameters like volume through the wheels. The machines can be remotely controlled through the computer interface too. Messier cites the evocative power of employing the vintage sewing machines. I think the silhouettes of the machines themselves add to the performance. (via Etsys Deutscher Blog)

Messier also milks bits of clocks for all their musical worth:

L'HORLOGER from Martin Messier on Vimeo.

And, inspired by the early twentieth century Italian futurist idea that "noise" be part of a musical composition, he made variations on Luigi Russolo's mysterious box the 'intonarumori'. His mechanisms are open and visible, rather than hidden. Both the 'intonarumori' and clocks are played in this performance:

LA CHAMBRE DES MACHINES from Martin Messier on Vimeo.

Juxtaposition & Craftivism

german panther, 2007, Luftballon/Luft/Kleber (balloon/air/glou), 960 x370 x 300cm

A balloon tank by German-based Dutch artist Hans Hemmert (via Adapt)


Pink M.24 Chaffee
A tank wrapped in pink

Danish artist Marianne Jorgensen stitched together a pink cozy, knit and crocheted in a collection of three thousand 15 cm x 15 cm squares for a WWII tank as a protest against the involvement of Denmark (UK and US) in the war in Iraq, by volunteers in Europe and the US in 2006.


Barb Hunt
antipersonnel, 1998 and ongoing
approximately 50 knitted sculptures
Collection of the artist
©2001 Barb Hunt

Canadian artist Barb Hunt knit replicas of antipersonnel land mines in various shades of pink wool, inspired by protests againts land mines. While Marianne Jorgensen cites how knitting and pinkness allude to coziness and home, the antipathy of war, Barb Hunt relates knitting to caring for the body, bandages and hand-knit socks for soldiers abroad and thus to caring, recooperating and protection.


Barb Hunt
antipersonnel - detail landscape

I find Hunt's collection very moving; to ponder the sheer inventiveness of human evil in creating such an array of civilian-killing devices along with the irony of justaposition with the cuddly medium and feminine* pink colour.

The wikipedia entry for Craftivism includes instructions for knitting your own "purse grenade" from Political protest turns to the radical art of knitting by Charlotte Higgins published by The Guardian, Monday 31 January 2005.

*At least according to current colour-biases.

The Oddballs, the Endangered, the Invasive & the Poodles

Jenny Pope's website J Pop Studios is a full zoo of exotic (and not so exotic) animal specimens in (colour reduction) woodblock print form. She tackles several topics in contemporary science, from flukes of evolotionary biology, to climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, extinction of the megafauna of Australia, invasive species as well as kitties & poodles.

She has a series investigating the effect of islands on evolution: 'Isolation Produces Oddballs' including the wonderously named, If Pygmy Elephants Climbed Trees (image size 13” x 17”)



which answers the question how did the 200 pound monitor lizard, the Komodo Dragon get so large? Apparently they were discovered on Flores, along with pygmy elephant bones - and sadly for them, the pachyderms are not known for tree climbing ability. She tackles 'Global Warming Band-aids' in her print 'Ocean Sequestration' (image size 19” x 23.75”) about the perils of simply trying to sequester CO₂ in the deep ocean, and the consequent ocean acidification.



Colleagues of mine are working on the more sophisticated (but as of yet unproven on a large scale) possibility of sequestering CO₂ in icelike 'clathrate' cage of hydrogen-bonded water molecules, known as CO₂ hydrate - below the seafloor, rather than in the deep sea. So, this print reasonates with me as both a marine scientist and a printmaker.

Her South of North---The Lapping Territories of Bears (image size 32” x 24”) is about the strange fate of bears in far north, where the changing climate has lead to the discovery of the hybrid 'pizzly' (polar bear/grizzly cross).



Plane and a crane (image size 15” x 11.5”) in her 'Endangered Animals' series not only highlights the whooping crane, but also "Operation Migration," which uses ultralight planes to teach and re-introduce the migration which was lost when a certain population was destroyed, by having the birds imprint on the plane.



The invasive starlings are a problem where I live, as in many places in North America. They were introduced by Eugene Schieffelin who wanted to release all of the birds mentioned in William Shakespere’s plays. Sometimes romantic ideas and biodiversity are a bad mix. A Starling Guide to Night (image size 19” x 23.75”) is part of her 'Invasive Species' series.



Do yourself a favour and check out her large portfolio. I love the dynamic style and colour pallette of her prints, which combine the whimsy of children's illustration with serious, well-articulated subject matter. Her fascination with ecology, biology and obvious enthusiasm for science in general is infectious. I do love the medium of woodblock prints, and prints created at the art-science interface are likely to delight me, but I'm also very impressed with the background and information she provides with each print. You could learn a lot simply by reading about her subject matter. Despite her dismay at the way we treat our environment, she has a sense of the ridiculous - highlighting the absurdity of using of rubber ducks, turtles, frogs and beavers spilled from a container ship in 1992 to trace currents - or their imagined interaction with real marine animals, or some of our misconceptions about birds, from recent history. This makes her portfolio wonderful to explore, though the topics remain may be dire.

You should also check out her blog and her jpopstudios etsy shop - which also includes etchings.

Cat in a Box

Surprise Content (1909)
Sal Meijer


'Just Fit' by Natsuo Ikegmai



"White Cat" (1919) by M.C. Escher


Allison Cole (via we say meow)


'Cat in a Box' by Carol Justin


'Sharing a bos' by Nicole Wong

Visualizing Hairballs & Beauty in Excess

I'm sorry to have neglected this blog of late. I've been busy with a number of things, so I thought I'd bring you a metaphorical miscellany of things which have been occupying my mind. One of the things that has been taking my time has been working on visualization of scientific data. The intersection of art and scienc being close to my heart, I attended a workshop with scientists, graphic designers, journalists and other communicators, and as such have been thinking about new ways of visualizing both for understanding and for explaing results. Complex networks of data are known as 'hairballs' (for, I think, obvious reasons). There are a number of oper-source packages for dealing with plotting and representing such monsters. Many of these programs are Python-based. As a result, I've been trying to teach myself some Python. I found this data visualization of the history of the code I'm trying to learn so I can make more exciting and effective visualizations an ironic thing to stumble upon. It's also quite pretty with all the overlapping, translucent layers:

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

(via bioephemera)

Check out similar visualizations at code swarm "an experiment in organic software visualization."

Speaking of layers of overlapping, translucent layers, I found this "Photo Opportunities" project by Swiss artist Corinne Vionnet quite beautiful. She found and combined hundreds of perhaps cliché tourist photos of famous locations and layered them to create something impressionistic and beautiful:







Swiss-based architect and programmer Michael Hansmey employs algrithms as design tools. In 'Subdivision: Ornamented Columns' he used iterative subdivision as a means of creating elaborately ornamented columns with millions of facets, beginning with an ideal Doric column. The layers are laser-cut from 1mm sheet to create these 2.7 m glorious columns. Read about his process here. I just imagine what Gaudí would do with such technology at his disposal.




(I saw this in a couple of places - most recently via Thersic.)

Background as Foreground

The unicorn in captivity, Coral Silverman, gouache on paper,
14" x 20", 2007

Here are a couple of artists who have taken recognizable, historic textiles (or whole textile forms), reinterpreted them, while playing with what is the background and what is the message.

Coral Silverman produced a whole series based on the well-known medieval Unicorn Tapestries - her 'Unicorn Travesties' to look at our disreguard for nature, comsumption, litering and disposable culture. To the left is her The Unicorn in Captivity,
gouache on paper (14" x 20") 2007 which you can compare with The Unicorn in Captivity, ca. 1495–1505, South Netherlandish, wool warp, wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts; 12 ft. 1 in. x 8 ft. 3 in. (368 x 252 cm), property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937 (37.80.5).

"In my Unicorn Travesties series I seek to explore the disregard we currently hold for the environment in the context of historical European iconography. Taking the medieval Unicorn Tapestries as my source, I have re-imagined their scenes as set within the modern world. Visually, I am very interested in the flat floral patterning that makes up the backgrounds of some of the tapestries. In many of my pieces I extract floral elements from their “mille fleur” backgrounds, subtly inserting within the works various pieces of urban refuse, such as cigarette butts, soda cans, smashed televisions, etc. I am using it as an ironic metaphor for the American way of life— a comment on our consumption, our disposable way of living, and ultimately our implication in the destruction of the environment."

American Spirit Blue
gouache on paper (9" x 9"), 2008

Flora Pink I
gouache on paper (14" x 20") 2007

Flora Black I
gouache on paper (14" x 20") 2007

The Met site includes other tapestries in the series, a discussion of the symbolism in the flora (the medieval viewer would be able to read these signs as easily as we can see that carving on a tree, a chain link fence, litter and the cultural appropriation inherent in American Spirit are all critiques of our culture), and the making of the tapestries. Both it, and Coral Silverman's site are worth a visit.

{via Cabinet of Curiosities, including the Silverman quotation}

Beth Katleman has taken that ubiquitous, 18th century, monochromatic French textile, Toile de Jouy, both fabric and wallpaper, and reimagined it in full, three-dimensional, kitchy yet creepy present day ceramics.

Folly, (detail), 2010
Porcelain, wire, steel rods and heat-shrink tubing
69 x 96 x 11 inches

"Three-dimensional porcelain 'wallpaper' hovers just off the turquoise wall, as part of a site specific installation at the Jane Hartsook Gallery. The overall installation is 192 x 108 x 11 inches."

Folly, (detail, elf, snail, Sacre Couer), 2010
Porcelain, wire, heat-shrink tubing
15 x 10 x 9 inches

Folly, (detail, flower girl on rock), 2010
Porcelain, wire, heat-shrink tubing
17 x 11 x 7 inches

"Babies scale a rocky precipice with varying degrees of success. A flower girl communes with a nimble lamb."

Folly, (detail, lost duck), 2010
Porcelain, wire, heat-shrink tubing
16 x 16 x 11 inches

"A toothless boy struggles to keep his pants up, a bridesmaid enjoys the view of the Arc de Triomphe from a bridge, reindeer graze and a hapless duckling tumbles off a waterfall."

While you visit Katleman's site, be sure to look at her other work, called "doll-sized rococo theaters of murder and domestic mayhem," by the New York Times. I mean, who could resist?

{via Apartment Therapy}