Nudibranch Fashion, Jellyfish Couture: Marine Invertebrates Do the Oscars

Nudibranch photographed by David Doubilet (via Photoshelter blog)

Recently, I was tickled to read a tweet;

Oh god. Once you compare one dress with a nudibranch, they all look like Nudibranchs.
— Seelix Sparklefists (@seelix) January 12, 2015

For context, the Golden Globes were the previous evening.

Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1904),
plate 43: Nudibranchia

A someone who enjoys the most weird and wonderful specimen of the animal kingdom and who has done a lot of fieldwork at sea, I knew instantly what she meant. If you are not familiar with arguably the most weird and wonderful sea creature going, you should watch National Geographic photographer David Doublet introduce the nudibranch. National Geographic calls the short film an introduction to "the glamor slugs of the sea" and Doubilet himself says, “Of all the creatures in the sea, these are the high fashion models.”

Leopold and Rudolf Blashka, glass model of a nudibranch,
late 19th/early 20th century

These spectacular marine invertebrates, are perhaps improbably, mollosks who shed their shells after the larval stage. They are multifarious and come in thousands of species, though they are often confused with sea slugs. You may have seen the illustrations by famed 19th century biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (whom I've written about previously) or the amazing glass models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. They inhabit the all the oceans of the world. The come in every conceivable colour combination, it seems, a range of improbable shapes and though most are small they can range from roughly 1 to 50 cm in length like the fabulous Spanish Dancers. The name "nudibranch" comes from the Greek for "naked gill", a description of the rosette of branchial plumes protruding from their backs. The tentacles on their heads are sensitive to touch, taste, and smell. They are hermaphrodites, each having both types of sex organs, but they do need two to mate. They may appear harmless, but they are carnivores, and some produce and use toxins defensively. Even cannibalism is not unknown, and they will eat other species of nudibranch.

This marvellous hat is part of Fashion at the Races'
Deep Sea series, and is specifically inspired by the
nudibranch. It is a headpiece which "is hand
sculpted out of hot pink jinsin straw, and it has
battery operated LED lights to mimic the
bioluminesene that many deep sea creatures have."

The tweet sent me down the "nudibranch fashion" rabbithole. These amazing creatures don't merely ressemble the more outré high fashion, they are sometimes their inspiration. Entire seasons for some designers may be inspired by sea creatures like the nudibranch.

Mirella Bruno Print Design Project
Direction Boards SS/2014.
Note that this includes a few nudibranches.

The logical thing to do, of course, is to have a go at it: matching award show gowns to nudibranch species, and see if in fact they do all ressemble nudibranches! I've written previously about how origami has inspired fashion, crystallography has inspired fashion or a wonderful mash-up of dresses and gig posters. So what about a mash-up of fashion and nudibranches? First, I thought to check whether this has been done.  Where I See Fashion,  is a visual feast; fashion student Bianca Luini creates an on-going blog of mash-ups of fashion photography and everything else, from natural history to abstract art, where the everything else echos the lines, patterns, shapes and colours of the fashion. Searching through their images, it seems she has paired fashion imagery with marine invertebrates, but only (as far as I can tell) with jellyfish.

Match #226
Yiqing Yin Fall 2012 | Jellyfishes at the Aquarium of The Bay in San Francisco, CA

Match #157
Jil Sander Spring 2011 | Jellyfish in a tank lit up with coloured lights photographed by pixelmama

Where I See Fashion: Match #1 gown and jellyfish

Where I See Fashion Match #8 photo and bioluminescent jellyfish

So, without further ado, and with thanks to all the people and creatures mentioned for their inspiration, here are my Oscar dress/Nudibranch pairs:

Marion Cottilard attends the 87th Annual Academy Awards, February 22, 2015
(MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images) and dorid nudibranch
Cadlina luteomarginata (Jeff Goddard, Santa Barbara).

Rosamund Pike attends the 87th Annual Academy Awards, February 22, 2015
(Photo by Jeff Vespa/WireImage) and a spanish dancer nudibranch
off Australia (Photoe by Chris, Underwater Australia)

Emma Stone (Getty) and Manned Nudibranch Aeolidia papillosa
(Photo (c) Luc Gangnon, 2015 Aquatic Biodiversity Monitoring Network)

Blanca Blanco (Getty) and nudibranch (via here)

Scarlett Johansson (Mark Raulston/AFP/Getty) and green nudibranch
(by Saffron on scuba-fish gallery)

Gwenyth Paltrow (Getty) and a Nudibranch egg rosette

The Blaschka Glass Menagerie Dynasty

The Natural History Museum (NHM)

German glass artists Leopold (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1939) Blaschka produced wonderous glass anotomical models of organisms, including many marine invertebrates and flowers, which went on to populate the natural history museums of the world, universities and aquaria. These were creatures and plants they wished to display but which were difficult to preserve and often rarely observed. Previously, models were limited to drawings, pressed specimens, photos, paper and wax models. The famous Blaschka models not only provided views of anatomy in a full three dimensions, they were beautiful and quite accurate. There were other glass artists making zoological and botanical models, but the Blaschkas were known for their attention to detail - and for the perhaps unexpected way this very specialized career in scientific illustration (in glass) was passed from father to son and how this one family of scientific artisans produced so much of the world's collections of glass specimen models.

Octopus from the Cornell collection

Leopold even kept an aquarium in his home to study these creatures for his models.

Physalia arethusa (glass model of a Portuguese Man-of-War). There are about two hundred tentacles made of thin coloured glass, supported and attached by fine copper wires. (via National Museum Wales) 

 

 

Despite its unexpected resemblance to the 'Golden Snitch' of Harry Potter and the imaginary game of Quidditch fame, the 'sea gooseberry' is a is a common genus of Ctenophora.

A 'sea gooseberry' or 'comb jellyfish' (Pleurobranchia rhododactyla).
Length: 205mm.

Charybdea periphyllum (glass model)

Pelagia cyanella (glass model).

Sea anenomies displaying a territorial dispute.
Here S. troglodytes fires stinging cells at A. mesembryanthemum who has ventured too close. This behaviour was observed first hand in the aquaria at the Blaschka's home.
Base: 180x110mm. Height: 80mm. (via National Museum Wales)

 

collection of 5 marine invertebrates in glass from the Aurelia aurita, Berenice euchroma, Physophora hydrostatica and Pelagia noctiluca species from the Fonazione Scienzia e Tecnia, Florence, Italy

Highly magnified model of single cell amoeba (Amoeba proteus).
Diameter: 120mm.

Life sized model of marine snail (Cerithium vulgatum) with glass body fitted in real shell.
Length: 90mm.

From the Harvard glass flower collection

Exploring Alternate Evolutionary Paths in Clay

Source: chrisgarofalo.com via minouette on Pinterest

This isn't the first time I've written about ceramic artists playing with variations on flora and fauna as we know it; it is something which definitely appeals to me, and fits squarely in that wondrous creative region where art and science intersect. Chicago-based artist Chris Garofalo took inspiration from her garden when she began to make hybrid creatures or plants in clay. I particularly like how her site describes this as imagining a different evolutionary path for life:

By blurring the distinction between lang, sea and air, the plant and animal kingdoms- by examing the state between the waving arms of a sea anemome and unfurling tendril of a fern- a kind of hybridization or exogamy of all biological lifeforms takes place. The results are an exploration into what might have occurred with slight changes in early evolutionary events.

Source: chrisgarofalo.com via minouette on Pinterest

The 'Basidiomycete Florid Hoveren' above alludes to the Basidiomycota a phylum which contains 37% of the true fungi, including mushrooms and yeasts. "Florid", of course, means flowery, and "Hoveren" is apparently Old English (frequentative of hoven) from which we get words like hover. So perahps it describes itself as a flowery, hovering, mushroom. the 'Siphonophore Royale' below is more transparent; a siphonophore is any of various transparent marine hydrozoans, of the order Siphonophora, that float or swim as colonies of polyps, the sort of colony of creatures we sloppily think of as 'jellyfish'. The 'Corallia Bractea' below literally can mean a 'gold leaf' coral, but it is also reminescent of the bracteate flower, where a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches (or bracts). The sculpture below, 'Blastomycetes' actually refers to a real organism; Any of various yeastlike, budding fungi of the genus Blastomyces that cause diseases in humans and animals. 'Redocumaize Porifera' is a bit mysterious. We know that porifera are the sponges, and maize the corn family. We can see how she is imagining alternate pathways for polyps, mushrooms, corals, flowers, grasses and sponges, or growing a garden of ceramic evolutionary might-have-beens.

Source: chrisgarofalo.com via minouette on Pinterest

Source: chrisgarofalo.com via minouette on Pinterest

 

Source: chrisgarofalo.com via minouette on Pinterest

Be sure to peruse the rest of her portfolio!

Jellyfish Chandelier

Lately, I've been all about bioluminescent comb jellies, so discovering the work of Czech student (!) Kateřina Smolíková I was immediately struck. She isn't the first to find inspiration for lighting in the diaphonous and often luminous beauties of the deep, but her Skyphos chandelier is so crisp and modern, it's like nothing else I've seen.






There is plenty to explore in her portfolio (via architizer).

If you prefer your jellyfish lighting with more fluid, organic and flexible lines, check out these plastic discomedusa lights by Roxy Towry-Russell:



French sculptor Géraldine Gonzalez has some really beautiful medusas too, some of which involve crystals and LEDs and others of paper.




Do not forget the anotomically correct and beautifully rococo glass work of the previously-blogged Timothy Horn.

Balloon Twins

Not just art and science, let's add some balloons today!
Like superheroes whose power is to create immense, inflated, jellyfish creatures, today I bring you not one, but two sculptors-of-unexpected-media: the balloon.

Jason Hackenwerth lives and works in NYC, creating ephemeral inflated sculptures evocative of botany or biology, or just plain sexuality, their eventual deflation mirroring life's transience too. The wiggling, jiggling, wearable sculptures are pretty hilarious.









Meanwhile, in Chicago, artist Willy Chyr ties his balloon sculptures a little more literally to anatomy, perhaps because he is a physicist by training (or more specifically physicist-economist-circus worker-sculptor). He writes that he is inspired by nature, rather than mimicking it - everything from bioluminescence to consciousness. Consider the comb jelly, installed in the Biological Sciences Learning Center, Chicago, IL, April-May 2009:

His website states:

It was inspired by the ctenophore, or comb jelly - a small marine animal characterized by having eight rows of cilia along its body, which scatter light to create a moving rainbow pattern.

The Comb Jelly consists of over 500 balloons, 81 LEDs, and took over 30 hours to build.

You might recall, magpie & whiskeyjack featured some footage of the bioluminescent comb jelly back in February. Follow the link if you would like to see the natural inspiration for this sculpture.

Or the Hydroida, another jelly:


Neuroplastic Dreams is a bit more poetic, evoking the "neuron forest".


Balluminescence - Lights, Balloons, Jellyfish! engaged the audience in making balloon jellyfish at Science Chicago's Labfest. I love the idea of marrying art and science, balloons and LEDs and involving the public! Now that's amazing job he's invented for himself.

roccoco jellyfish

Australian-born, US-based sculptor Timothy Horn has a taste for the roccoco, and tells ironic fairytales with his allusions to ornate historical objects, on unusually large scales or in unexpected media. Check out his gorgeous, yet humourous jewellery on a heroic scale. He caught my attention with his hommage to my favorite (& yours) 19th century German biologist-taxonimist-scientific illustrator par excellence Ernst Haeckel and his jellyfish. These are some chandeliers made in transparent rubber!

Discomedusae
2004
Transparent rubber, copper tubing, lighting fixtures
7ft diameter


Villa Medusa - installation view, 2006


Medusa
2006
Silicone rubber, copper tubing, fiber optics
9ft diameter


Stheno (detail)
2006
Silicone rubber, copper tubing, fiber optics


I have always wanted to create jellyfish in 3D. I have so far made 2D relief prints, inspired by Ernst Haeckel, like my avatar (seen in the column to the right), but no sculptures - with the exception of my Portuguese man-of-war costume, which involved a paper jellyfish headdress. Sometimes I think about learning how to work with glass for the sole purpose of making jellyfish. Of course, I am not alone in my appreciation of the spectacular form and light interactions (transmission, reflection, refraction and emission) found in these creatures. A quick google search reveals many glass jellies for sale. But I also admire those who, like Horn, have made such sculpture in unexpected media.

I really enjoyed Alyssa Coe and Carly Waito -Coe and Waito's ceramic jellyfish installation which appeared in the window of Magic Pony in May, 2007, (amongst other places) as part of the MADE show Come Up to My Room.



25 - 30 handsculpted porcelain jellyfish

American jeweler Arlene Fisch applies textile techniques to metal to produce her larger-than-life jellyfish. Her exhibition involved blown air to allow her creatures to move naturally (encorportating the fourth dimension of time):

Black Sea Nettle


Orthocanna

Miwa Koizumi employed trash - specifically PET (polyethylene terephthalate) water bottles - to make her water animals. She manipulated the shape of the empty bottles using heat guns, soldering irons and cutting tools. The results are magical.

plastic water bottles, 2005
installation view at sawaguzo at Redux


Volvic water bottle, 2005

p.s. Check out Timothy Horn's other exhibitions when you visit his site. Who could resist replica of a gilded 18th-century Neapolitan sedan chair made with crystalized rock sugar?


Mother-Load
2008
Crystallized rock sugar, ply-wood, steel
9ft.6in. x 6ft. x 5ft. 6in.