I’m absolutely in love with anything involving suspended motion, the more obsessively detailed the better. One artist I particularly enjoy is British artist Claire Morgan. What intrigues me about Claire is not only the amazingly beautiful creations she makes out of an insane amount of small suspended objects that can be as difficult to work with as that fluff that flies out of dandelions but that she introduces taxidermy to her pieces which is rather odd – but I love it. The thought of putting things like dead crows or fruit flies into a sculpture can seem grotesque and yet her creations are anything but.

In the artists words:

My work is about our relationship with the rest of nature, explored through notions of change, the passing of time, and the transience of everything around us. For me, creating seemingly solid structures or forms from thousands of individually suspended elements has a direct relation with my experience of these forces. There is a sense of fragility and a lack of solidity that carries through all the sculptures. I feel as if they are somewhere between movement and stillness, and thus in possession of a certain energy.

The way Claire artfully freezes time is one part of what makes these pieces so engaging but I’m especially drawn by these completely fabricated scenes that are inspired by nature and contain elements of form or movement that we are familiar with and yet she puts her own spin on them in a way that pulls them completely out of reality. Like the above image from her 2011 collection titled, “Gone To Seed”, she creates the shape of a dandelion that has begun to release that signature fluff and is in the middle of expansion when a crow falls through the middle, splitting the form in two. The forms are natural and yet the scale and interaction between the crow and the dandelion are completely impossible.

While You Were Sleeping, 2009

Clearing, 2009

Tracing Time, 2007

Here is the End of All Things, 2011

Claire has also begun drawing and exploring the two-dimensional world on paper. She begins by using paper which includes actual residue of the taxidermy process and refers to them as Blood Drawings. Below is Monumental from her 2011 drawings.

Down Time, 2011

images via Claire Morgan

Perhaps inspired by the most recent holiday and the fireworks show I witnessed down on Lake Union, as seen in the above photo I took from the new South Lake Union Park, I have been looking at a lot of imagery related to displays of light and the actions of electricity. However, it’s not the overall display that has caught my attention but rather the details.

Some of the most intriguing imagery is that of Hiroshi Sugimoto in his project titled Lighting Fields. The artists description of this project:

The word electricity is thought to derive from the ancient Greek elektron, meaning “amber.” When subject to friction, materials such as amber and fur produce an effect that we now know as static electricity. Related phenomena were studied in the eighteenth century, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. To test his theory that lightning is electricity, in 1752 Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He conducted the experiment at great danger to himself; in fact, other researchers were electrocuted while conducting similar experiments. He not only proved his hypothesis, but also that electricity has positive and negative charges.

In 1831, Michael Faraday’s formulation of the law of electromagnetic induction led to the invention of electric generators and transformers, which dramatically changed the quality of human life. Far less well-known is that Faraday’s colleague, William Fox Talbot, was the father of calotype photography. Fox Talbot’s momentous discovery of the photosensitive properties of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging. The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.

The images take on an interesting quality that exhibit the characteristsics of such things as water, land and vegetation – painted with brushes of light. The intricacies are amazing with softer areas that look like hair or grassy hills with bright points of light sprouting into trees. Simply stunning.

images via Hiroshi Sugimoto

I recently came acros an old article from Environmental Graffiti about the glow worm, a sophisticated cave-dwelling predator that creates an elegant, glowing landscape that lures in its prey. This reminded me of a a rather old project out of Athens, Greece that I thought to be quite lovely. The temporary, interactive urban installation was called White Noise White Light and was installed as one of nine installations during the 2004 Olympics and was sited at the base of the Acropolis which provided quite a stunning backdrop.

I don’t think the designers at Howeler + Yoon Architecture actually used the glow worm as their muse but nevertheless, there is a fascinating connection in form and somewhat in function as well. People are drawn in by points of light light like a moth to a flame but instead of being snared, the light brightens and moves as they pass through the sea of fiber-optic stalks. The movement produces a visual flow of light and at the same time activates a tiny hidden speaker.

From the designers, “Comprised of a 50′x50′ grid of fiber optics and speakers, ‘White Noise / White Light’ is an interactive sound and light field that responds to the movement of people as they walk through it. What appears at first to be a static, neutral and transparent grid of vertical markers dissolves into a luminous sound-scape by night. As pedestrians enter into the fiber optic field their presence and movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LED’s and white noise from speakers below. Just as white light is made of the full spectrum of color, white noise contains every frequency within the range of hearing in equal amounts. If motion is detected, the white LED illumination grows brighter while the white noise increases in volum. Once motion is no longer detected, the light and sound fade into dimness and silence.”

A movie of the installation is below:

images via Howeler + Yoon Architecture and Environmental Graffiti

The upcoming holiday reminds me of my fascination with spider webs and their delicate patterns and amazing architectural structures. While I’m not exactly excited about the trees surrounding my house providing a rather large safe haven for a freakishly large breed of these leggy creatures, I’m constantly reminded of their amazing spinning abilities and acrobatics. Of course, I’m not the only one fascinated with their creations. Argentinian artist and architect, Tomás Saraceno, has created a stunning piece based on the art of web spinning called 14 Billions made entirely of black rope.

From Stockholm’s Bonniers konsthall, “In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. An enormous model of the poisonous spider the Black Widow’s web, the point of departure for the new work is how scientists use images of spiders’ webs to describe the origin and structure of the universe. The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.”

Water can make interesting patterns all on it’s own…swirling, flowing, splashing and falling. I recently came across a fountain and was fascinated not by the pattern of the water within the fountain spray or the ripples in the pool but rather colors and shapes in the pool where the water hit water. I later found myself pawing through imagery online, continuing the fascinating with the shapes of water hitting water. I came across this image shown here that captures the moment of fascination I had earlier.

On my way to and from work each day I have the pleasure of walking past an art gallery. Sometimes I linger and stare at the art inside, taking in all the colors, shapes, patterns and textures, getting a bit of inspiration for the day. Now they have some paintings up from a particular artist that I always enjoy, Z.Z. Wei.

A Chinese-born artist, Wei traveled to the northwest and found himself in awe of the beauty within the region. The landscapes he creates bring out this emotion, like a dream world stretching out in front of you with the perspective slightly skewed and the heavily saturated. I find his paintings captivating…the light and shadows, the colors. Some of the scenes take me back to my childhood, growing up on a rural farm in the hills where I often spent hours daydreaming about the awe-inspiring world around me or going on car rides with my grandpa as he told me tales or drove the long curving road around the lake that always signalled the beginning of summer. The work of Z.Z. Wei turns my childhood inspiration into a visual display.

images via Z.Z. Wei, Artnet, Atticgallery

Tara Donovan, installation artist out of Brooklyn, New York, creates pieces made out of everyday ordinary objects like drinking straws, cups, fishing wire and paper. These simple objects when are then transformed into amazing textural and topographical works of art. The individual object then is almost no longer recognizable in it’s original form but has taken on a new life form. The installation in the image above feels like some sort of life form bubbling out of the ceiling, reflecting light in different ways throughout the form. But the piece is made simply with a sea of styrofoam cups and hot glue. A detail shot is below.

Below are images of an untitled piece from 2003 that uses paper plates held together by hot glue to form highly texture spheres the look almost soft and fuzzy from a distance.

“Haze” was made in 2005 from stacking an amazing amount of clear drinking straw to create a sensual wall that bubbles up in places that gives it an almost liquid look.

The following piece uses ripped up tarpaper that has been stacked into an undulating landform titled “Transplanted”. It was firt exhibited outdoors in the IBM Exhibition Space on 57th and Madison Ave. in New York City in the fall of 2003. Following it’s time in the outdoors, it was moved into the Ace Gallery indoor exhibition space.

images via Ace Gallery

Amsterdam-based photographer Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk has created a series titled The Andromeda Strain that focuses more on the notion of discovery than the place itself. The images conjure up thoughts of a space or time perhaps untouched or undiscovered by humans. I personally found some of the imagery, shapes, patterns and colors to be incredibly intriguing and thought provoking. Words from the artist about this series, via featureshoot:

After making many landscape photographs I realized the search for special places is more important than the place itself. The notion of discovery has been always intimately linked to photography. The cliche of the photographer as an explorer of unknown and rough places became a starting point to construct images. I played with the “National Geographic:-language essentially without leaving my hometown. I searched for locations that, after small interventions, can fit in an imaginary travelogue. Using low-budget special effects and lighting I staged natural phenomena and imagery. To this work made on location I added still-lives constructed in the studio. Referring to nature and scientific photography, the tabletop landscapes create confusion on the overall status of the series. I often choose material that has a perishable or unpredictable quality, like foam or spaghetti. No Photoshop is used to achieve the effects. The artificial and the real, and the different sources the image is based on, should be present simultaneously.

images via Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk

In Brisbane, architects Nettleton Tribe have tranformed an old elevated parking facility into thirteen stories of office space above 9 levels of parking and teamed up with artist Jennifer Marchant to beautify the exterior of the building. The new art piece creates made up of 549 laser cut powder coated aluminum that were custom formed into a lovely mesh that disguises the parking facility while allowing for continual air flow and therefore saving money on mechanical air ventilation.

The artist chose to design a topographical piece called “Landlines”, that depicts the contours of Brisbane’s own Cunningham’s Gap and the Main Range. The inspiration came from the very nature that urban environments tend to be cut off from the surrounding landscape and few people get to take advantage of the views seen by tall buildings that look out from the urban core. Marchant brings the contours of the landscape in and adds a twist by debicting the 2 dimensional graphic traditionally used in the professional world to depict 3 dimensional land forms and show it on a vertical building.

images via world architecture news

There’s no doubt, water should not look like that. In the Chaohu Lake in Heifei, China, it does. At least for now. But with the country putting the cleanup of it’s waterways on in it’s sights, having invested over $7 billion towards the treatment of eight rivers and lakes in 2009, hopefully things like this algae filled lake will soon be an image of the past.

Despite the unnatural state of this water, there is an amazing amount of beauty in the image. The fisherman can be seen instead as a painter, his oar the brush and the water the canvas that supplies it’s own paint. He stirs the water, skimming across the canvas in his boat and with simple strokes applies the color. He paints his movements through this somewhat surreal landscape.

image via boston globe