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Vile Creatures: The Art of Lindsey Carr

Lindsey Carr is an artist/illustrator based in Glasgow whose creations I find delightful. Having admired her work for many years, I love the direction that she’s taken in recent years – richer, more substantial, with bold yet translucent color. The antique, luscious, yet delicate qualities of her paintings filled with flowers, animals, and mythical beings lure the eye and enchant and refresh. Taking inspiration from Rococo art, still lifes of the Old Masters, and the naturalist illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the gloss and glimmer of Carr’s painted world is refined as well as vibrant. Her charming, surreal, historically influenced style is eminently suited for depictions of chimerical figures such as Alkonost.

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Sempertarium

The dramatic and beautifully vivid jewelry of Saint Petersburg-based Sempertarium (by Olya Starvina) features Biblically accurate angels, bats, swords, and Victorian hands. Gothic cathedral arches are set in gemstones like glass, creating a brilliant, unique, and gorgeous effect. With their air of ecclesiastical splendor, Starvina’s jewels are both elegant and saturnine.

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Sarah Jarrett

Sarah Jarrett’s gently intriguing, melancholy collages combine strong color, imagery from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a fabulous sense of surrealism. She is highly prolific, with a profusion of emotive collage works. Transposition, juxtaposition, silhouettes, and flowers all play a large role in her work. Lovely and mysterious and musing, the many layers and textures of her ethereal world draw the viewer in to its sense of tragic intimacy.

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Bea Bastet

The artwork of Beatriz Bradaschii contains a sweet surrealism. Flowers, insects, human teeth, and eyes all recur as symbols in a rich, gently melancholy world evocative of lore, both whimsical and macabre. Her Victorian-inspired, Wonderland-esque aesthetics, the imagery of a severed head, lacerated heart, exposed rib cage, carnivorous flowers, or pox-ridden countenances of haunting beauty, are rendered in a precious style, and speak of emblems of particularly feminine horror, as well as the terrors of childhood. Her highly imaginative, cunningly layered sculptures are also incredible – including Memento Mori Mushroom, which features a detachable face revealing a skull hidden behind it. I have one of her lovely clay pins, hand-painted in acrylic and gouache.

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Age of the Succubus: Nona Limmen

I love the hazy, dreamily melancholy photography of Nona Limmen. The poetic vintage graininess, the doubling/multiplying and blurry transposition of imagery, shadowy and ethereal atmosphere, and ritualistic poses all create a soft world of arcane magic, the sphere of an almost nostalgic occultism: a folkloric vision that looks as if it has been translated through the lens of classic and beloved cinema.

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Clockwork Angels: The Art of Masaaki Sasamoto

The glowing paintings of Masaaki Sasamoto are drenched with gold and a mellow, old-world radiance. Butterflies, fairies and other mythical beings, girl-automatons with exposed machinery, flowers, winged seraphic figures, are common motifs in his work. The mildly serene and rather enigmatically inexpressive smiles of his subjects seem to emanate a nature half-deity, half-doll. Sasamoto combines traditional Japanese techniques with modern aesthetics in a unique, luminous, memorable style that evokes antiquity, a fantastical air, an atmosphere slightly surreal and wondrously airy yet rich.

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Ecclesia

Ecclesia Jewelry evinces a godly geometry. Combining medieval themes and inspirations with modern aesthetics and natural forms, it is simultaneously minimalist and baroque. I love the pieces incorporating pearls (there is an ingenious, multi-stranded necklace of pearls, The Splitting of a Cell, in which the strings of pearls resemble spindle fibers during mitosis), and concentric lines reminiscent of organic shapes, and the sinuous, hypnotic forms of fire. There are rosaries, castles, chalices, tears, fascinating prismatic stones, and even a beautiful piece representing the milky eye of a blind dog called Eyes of a Blue Dog (or the Milk-Eyed Mender). Ecclesia has a highly distinctive style which evokes Catholic symbolism as well as the pure and intricate creations of nature.


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Gacela of the Dark Death – Federico Garcia Lorca

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

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Vessel by Damien Jalet

Vessel (2015) is a strange and lovely creation by choreographer Damien Jalet in collaboration with multidisciplinary sculptor Kohei Nawa.

Human bodies take totemic, writhing, fluid, and torturous forms, combining and resisting assimilation, constantly morphing and shifting. Slightly uncanny, it feels like a ritual that is being enacted, and has the clarity of a hallucinatory vision. Seeming to take place in a black void of night, on a body of water dimly moonlit and only made visible by its dark ripples, it has the terrible perfection of a transposed dream.

“At the intersection between sculpture and choreography, the two art forms meet and become indivisible. Taking the contradictions of the human body as their starting point, the artists, together with a group of seven dancers, create a fascinating work embracing regeneration and deterioration, solid and liquid, anatomy and mythology.”

Jalet also choreographed the iconic dance sequences in 2018’s Suspiria. The unnerving, complex, unique and vital qualities of his art feel alienating, but necessary – inevitable the moment that they are revealed. They are beautiful in the sense of something that is not known, not imagined, not thought of, until he calls it forth, at which point it answers an unspoken call in us.