Familiar British Wildlife by Clive Landen

meles meles meles A48

Clive Landen's work looks at the idea of capturing death, but though the use of road kills of British animals. 
All the image have been taken with the use of a tripod and have been titled or labelled if you like with the name of the animal with their zooalogiacal name and place of where the 'incident' took place, for this poor badger it was the A48. The text for each image gives the viewer the understanding of the image, allowing them to grasp the meaning. 
"Modern technological living, it is suggested, has distanced us from Nature and we need to somehow become reconnect to 'it'." (Martin McCabe)

"Barthes would later go on to say about    photography 'it must be described in relation to death'."  

oryctolagus cuniculus B4063

Outside Inside - Regine Ramseier

Regine Ramseier is a German artist that works mostly with instillations, the image to the left is one of her instillation pieces. It consists of 2000 dandelion flowers suspend from the celling to create a surreal landscape where by she brings the outside inside. I really enjoy this work, its interesting and works well with in the space that she chose to construct it. As an instillation this would have required continuous upkeep to make sure that the space that the dandelions in habited was kept clean and inviting much like a garden should be. 

Sven Fennema - Urban Decay

Sven Fennema a German photographer looks at decay in places, mostly architectural spaces. much of his work looks at buildings and spaces that had history such as old theatres,hospitals, castles and churches form all over the world. 
Fennema's work is captivating, there is almost a feeling of fantasy to the images, the lighting gives a warm feel to some of the images, as well as cold in others. 
What is so special about decay and photography is that there is a dialogue between photographer and the subject weather that is a car tangled by nature or a building whithering away. The idea of this dialogue is that you can feel the past echoing all around you when you are in the spaces, if the image is good that the view should have the very same feelings of past echoing of the people that inhabited these spaces. 

One Thousand Means of Escape - Astrid Bin

Astrid Bin works with the idea of being an interdisciplinary artist, meaning that her work is very much about being experimental. Bin has played with the idea of experimental art by bating and un-baiting 100 mouse traps, the aim to make a 1000 dollars in a year, where by she looked her self in a bank vault for 10 nights, Sending postcards to a disused building, shaving her head and spending 24 hours inside a phone box.  
Her work ranges from insulation, sculpture, art in public spaces, text pieces, photography, printed pieces and performance work. 

Call Me 

One Thousand Means of Escape

Hopes and Fears 

Dead art - Polly Morgan

The work of Polly Morgan is created with the use of Taxidermy animals from birds to rabbits. Much of the Taxidermy is sent to Morgan by owners of the animals or are found as road kill. 

The work is strangely inviting about recreating life out of death. 

All the animals are treated with care and become so fragile with in her sculptures, yet the animals appear to us out of context, causing the viewer to look more at the animal, despite the stereotypes that are attached to them. 

Take the rat in the glass for example, the rat is associated with death, disease and plague carrying, however when placed inside a glass under its own bell jar it becomes something very different. 

The animal now looks peaceful and gentle, the feeling of death and illness is far removed from this lavish scene.  

Its is understandable how this style of work is not to everyone's taste, but the ingenuity and beauty in the work must be rewarded. 

Morgan illustrates the inherent paradox of taxidermy. It forces us to confront death, but also makes us feel we can defeat it - superficially at least. (The Observer, 18th July 2010) 

We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars - Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn work with photographer, sculptor and mixed media. But most of all a Painter. 
The work that Marc Quinn creates does not have words to describe its beauty and power, the detail with in each image is incredible (and thats just on the screen). The scale of the images is also a huge indication of the level of time and dedication that has been put into these images. 

Much of Quinns work is looking at the body and its relationship to nature, and what defines life as being human. The use of the eye is one thing that in many ways makes us human, its our window to the world, our looking glass. Each time we blink we close the shutter on the world and store what we see each and every day. At the same time that work that Quinn has created is so much like the outer reaches of space, the iris when this size could even be seen as a nebula, surrounding the unknown dark space of the world out there seen thought the pupil. In some ways that Quinn could be suggesting to us that we are endless as beings. 

Books as Art - Guy Larmmee

The Great Wall 

The artist Guy Larmmee has mainly worked in worked in photography of the landscape, however in this post its the book art that s of interest. The work was created in 2008 and continued on to 2009 and then 2010.  
The work was inspired by The Great Wall of China. 
The work is complied of a 100 volumes of encyclopaedias. 
   
'So I cave landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowldeg returned to what they are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they falltern and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopaedias returned to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fog and clouds erase everything we know everything we think we are' -  Colossal Art and Design, Guy Larmmee, December 22, 2011.

The detail of this work is incredible, the way that a series or just an individual book can be transformed into something so familiar to us can become something very unknown to us,in the form of a book sculpture.