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Month: September 2011

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Emily Kaelin

Emily Kaelin is a young artist who deals with the theme of repulsion versus beauty, in installations, mixed-media art, and paintings, mimicking human organic materials that are generally thought to be disgusting, such as flesh, hair, blood, and bone, and creating pieces that are conflicting, visceral, and boundary-pushing. She describes her own art in these words: “push and pull of appealing and repellent, comforting and upsetting, lovely and ugly; inability to look at or render self objectively; impulse and intuition and instinct; emotionality; flesh; hairiness.”

Her artwork constantly intersects the descriptors of ugly, strangely beautiful, alluring, repulsive, bizarre, off-putting, intriguing, fleshy, raw, delicate, and otherworldly. It expresses agony incarnate in the body, in its materials of ink and parchment (blood and skin).

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Poetry: “Disown” by saartha

And it broke my heart but I
killed every trembling thing. The yearning
spaces subsided, they were reddened, they
were convinced to stillness.

And it broke my heart but God
became God-in-exile, became
yearning spaces. I buried my demons
with a knife, and left them to it. Exile
was the new love, it was a barren land,
it took no prisoners.

And it broke my heart but the pieces
hardened, they were as clockworks,
they counted down the hours. I was
waiting, my body was a sharp plane,
a border, I was waiting, everything

had already happened, I had killed it,
it drifted through the motionless diaspora,
the hours turned on me and they had teeth.

— saartha

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Internal Forest: The Paper-Cutting Art of Elsa Mora

Elsa Mora is a boundlessly creative paper-cutting artist. With sharp knives and scissors, she crafts evocative, entangling scenes, vignettes, and storytelling images of incredible detail out of paper, full of fairytale whimsy and personal expression. Her work has a childlike quality, reminiscent of vintage children’s book illustrations, as well as a complexity, intricacy, and attention to detail on a miniature scale; showing an internal wilderness of twisting vines/blood vessels, red flowers, insects, and other symbols of nature’s marriage with the anatomy of the psyche in her work. The pieces convey the alluring yet foreboding air of fairy tales, a sense of personal pain, broken innocence, the mystery and power of nature, and playfulness. They are three-dimensional works of art, violent drops of red against a white background, all rendered in the most lovingly detailed and ingenious way in a fragile and ephemeral medium.

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Jeremy Hush

To quote Anagnorisis, the macabre, elaborate, wild yet delicate drawings of Jeremy Hush are “heavy influenced by Arthur Rackham and other 19th-century illustrations….His spidery drawings are dark and mysterious, but, like Rackham’s drawings, evoke the fear, love, and awe one might have for nature and her power.” He often draws with ballpoint pens he finds in hotels around the world (Hush is prone to wanderlust), uses “traditional India ink and watercolor,” and “also experiments with a plethora of other media. such as coffee, for example.”

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