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sovowe · 7 years ago

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Rural Warfare or How to Defend Yourself in an Indifferent World

The idea:

It started out when I was walking my dogs through the Brandenburg forest. Whilst walking, I noticed a large amount of glass shards strewn throughout my route - something I had never come accross in Krakow, where we previously lived. The glass pieces were especially concentrated at crossings. It was around this time that I also began running in the forest with

headphones in, sometimes as late as ten in the evening, when it was pitch black outside. There was a certain vulnerability involved in esentially losing two vital senses, usually directed at the outside world: vision and hearing.

After a handful of walks and a couple of runs I once again came accross an intersection littered with glass pieces, and this is when inspiration struck: why not make ‘weapons’ with which I could protect myself against a potential aggressor on one of my late-night runs?

The idea was of course perposterous, but it entertained me, so I set about picking up glass shards, and looking for a nice clubbish stick. My intention was to imbed the glass pieces into the stick, and make it a weapon to ward off imaginary attackers. I further developed this with projectile-pine-cones as logically the club would only be useful in close combat, and that is something one would like to avoid if possible.

The execution:

As it turns out, jamming shards of glass into wood is not as easy as it sounds. The pieces kept falling out and the club was very fragile - which actually added to the humour of it all - but I was not satisfied. I wanted a proper club. What I decided to do was make the club out of plasticine, which would make sure the glass stayed put, and introduced a childish and ___ colourful element to the object (see photo above). The pieces of glass in the pinecones were also secured using plastecine.

What now?

Since summer 2017, the pieces have been left on my bedroom shelf to collect dust, but this revisiting has rekindled my interest. I am thinking of coming up with a third weapon to round it out to a nice number, and create posters displaying the weapons’ attributes like in warfare games.

Update:

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sovowe · 7 years ago

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Honeybees + Murano

“Each vessel begins with a hand-rolled cylinder of chicken wire, wire found in Venice and characterized by a finer module than that of the hive sculptures made in New York.

Glass is blown into the cylinder, protrudes between the wires, and balloons delicately above the top. Some vessels retain wire embedded in their surfaces. Amber glass is the base color in which Harvest mixes gold or silver leaf and other additives that affect opacity, reflectivity, and hue. Sprinkling the hot surface with powdered glass pigment and reinserting the vessel into the furnace creates a rough yet dainty texture that resembles a dusting of pollen. (Denatured: Honeybees + Murano catalogue, Venice, 2013)”

Check out her website.

[images and text: https://abominableink.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/judi-harvest-a-brave-new-world-of-apiary-art/]

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sovowe · 7 years ago

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Yansu II

“Art is often a collaborative process, but Beijing-based artist Ren Ri has a developed truly unique creative partnership, crafting his work in concert with a hive of bees, reports the Huffington Post.

An active beekeeper since 2008, Ren has been grooming his bees’ beeswax output, encouraging his swarm to build its honeycomb structures in visually striking, sculptural forms.

The resulting series of beeswax sculptures, collectively titled “Yuansu II,” are housed within clear plastic containers shaped like squares, polyhedrons, and circles. Ren builds wooden frames for the bees to build upon that extend from the container’s center, where the queen bee dwells, to its edges.

As the bees steadily generate beeswax, the artist plays the role of god, rotating the structure once a week (in reference to the Bible’s seven days of creation) to encourage the worker bees to focus their efforts in different directions. Though the results are already unpredictable, Ren increases the random nature of the sculptures by letting a toss of the die determine which direction to turn each piece.

“Beeswax is a very special material; it’s unstable and can change shape with temperature,” Ren told Cool Hunting. ” The structure of the wax cells is orthohexagonal, which is an inconceivable feature in the natural world and it’s a peculiarity of honeybees.”

The artist chose the bee hive as an artistic partner and medium because “I wanted to try to eliminate the subjectivity of the artist and the mediation of bees served this purpose.” This is remarkably similar to the impulse that drove Emil Lukas to start making paintings with fly larvae, a practice he explained at length in a recent artnet News interview.

Even as a child, Ren’s dual interest in art and nature was readily apparent: “Back then, I was spending a lot of time observing animals and plants,” the artist explained. “My passion for molding was parallel to an interest for insect ethology.”

The project’s title, “Yuansu,” is based on the Chinese words for element (��yuan”) and mold (“su”), a reference to man’s influence over the planet, shaping, destroying, and interfering with the natural world. Seen inside the clear container, the honeycombed sculptures reflect that tension between the organic and the man-made. It is at once a strange and beautiful reminder of the ongoing struggle between the two forces, and of what can be achieved when we embrace and work in harmony with nature.”

[images and text: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/artists-honeycomb-sculptures-made-by-bees-spark-buzz-56554]

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sovowe · 7 years ago

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Unbearable Lightness

“Unbearable Lightness is an amazing art installation from Dutch designer Tom Gabzdil which features 40,000 bees and a honeycomb sculpture of a martyred Jesus Christ.

Industrious bees created a honeycomb skin over the laser sintered framework, before filling each cell with honey they produce. Next, the bees worked hard to remove the honey from the cells only to return it to their own beehive, cleaning the figure and restoring the wax cells to their original state. Gabzdil made the honeycomb a red-orange color to symbolize the cross. The Dutch designer regularly works with bees and explores the manipulation of living creatures that are seemingly unaware of the constraints imposed by humans on their existence. The viewer is able to recognize this element of manipulation of the bees while ignorant to the invisible constraints and measures imposed on our own existence.”

[images and text: https://mymodernmet.com/bees-swarm-honeycomb-jesus-5/]

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sovowe · 7 years ago

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Artist interest: Ken Smith