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. 

Light Harted

Aled Lewis 

I thought after my potentially heavy posts it was time to look at some thing a little light hatred. The work of Aled Lewis. Lewis is an illustrative graphic designer who has created designs for T-shirts and other products, much of his work is light hatred. 

The work that I will be looking at is his series called 'Toy Stories' where Lewis uses children's toys to create imaginative situations with accompanying captions.   

Much of the work is influenced by film and word play, as well as modern site such as ebay that we can all relate to. The work is really enjoyable to look at, its very refreshing and clever, that putting toys into certain positions can make up such funny narratives. 

Close to Home

Naoya Hatakeyama 

The series Slow Glass by Naoya Hatakeyma is a body of work that Hatakeyma created after a four month residents in Milton Keynes. While in the UK, he became interested in English rain. 

The work that was made was made just up the road from where I live now New Milton. He created the images by looking through windows where the rain had fallen, by keeping the rain drops in focus the town has been abstracted with the use of light and open New Forest roads.  

What I love about this work is that it doesn't show where in the town that the images are you would really have a hard time knowing that the images were taken in New Milton, so in a sense if you were to see this work in a gallery, having knowledge of the town, you would still not be able to make those links straight away. 

The work really looks at the way that water reacts when it falls upon different surfaces, such as glass. 

The name 'Slow Glass came from a name taken from the novel Light of other days by Bob Shaw. 

A Child's Mind

This post came to me after my bother made a sudden comment on an image that I turned to in the book Leg by Donna Karan. The image was of Kate Moss by Juergan Teller, 
The image shows only the backs of her legs, you can not see the rest of her at all, there is no indication of her facial expression or anything to tell us that she might or might not be dead. Here is the rest of what followed from me opening the page that caught my 8 year old brothers eye. 

Kate Moss - By Juergan Teller 

I want to talk about my brother and his reaction to this very image. As I was looking through the book for images to use for my self portraits of my legs my brother stopped me at this image and said to me 'That's a dead person', there was no question in his voice he knew just by the way that her legs were positioned and the way that the image had been cropped, so you were unable to see her face that this was a picture of a dead woman. 
I asked way he thought this as I knew that this was not a dead woman but an image of the famous model Kate Moss from the small print under the image. His response was 'cos they are lying on their front and if they were on their back they would be alive'.


Its fascinating how honest children are they have concept of time or death yet they can see and understand what death might look like, I guess you could say that the era that we live in has something to do with this, that children are more exposed to these kind of images, whether on the news or in TV and Film. 
But this might not necessarily be true. Through out our lives when growing up we must try to learn our way around the world and this is mainly done by images and what we see in the world around us. We have to try to understand the things we see, with the little amount of experience we have. Yet with what we do have we can begin to draw our conclusions on the world until we learn other wise. 


To prove this point  have a clip of John Bergers Ways of Seeing Program - Episode 4 
at 2:39 he discusses how child relate their own experiences to images.