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Flowers of Sickness: Marcel van der Vlugt’s “A New Day”

These lovely images are from Marcel van der Vlugt’s medically inspired series A New Day. They depict “flowers of illness,” featuring the subjects in hospital regalia (bandages, oxygen masks, bound limbs), among medical equipment, upon the operating and examining table, but simultaneously intertwined with, wearing, sprouting flowers, seeming somehow strong at the same time that they represent fragility and trauma, and suggesting that they are reborn, given new life in the midst of sickness and sterility.

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Flora and Fauna: The Craft of Lorenzo Nanni

Lorenzo Nanni makes incredibly intricate, beautiful (often wearable) art, taking inspiration in an amazing way from organic forms and anatomical structures, reflecting a kind of gorgeous hybridization between animal and plant life, often replete with creaturesque tendrils seeming to infest as well as adorn the host. He creates his own breathtaking “lifeforms” from craft materials. I particularly love his Arteries, Veins series, the way that they depict details from anatomy as a textbook would, but in the startlingly tangible materials of his craft: felt, beads, embroidery. They look so visceral, so intricate, but remind us at the same time of their artificial construction, the biological juxtaposed with the inorganic.

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Anouk Wipprecht: The Merging of Technology and Fashion

Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch fashion designer who works in the emerging field of “fashionable technology,” defined by Sabine Seymour as “the intersection of fashion, design, science, and technology.” Anouk seeks to create a “higher state of connectivity between the body and our clothing,” a physical and psychological relationship wherein what we wear responds to us, and we are also affected by what we wear, producing something more than just the traditional function of coverture/adornment. What results is one-of-a-kind, architectural, avant-garde garments with bold silhouettes, vested with circuitry and a regalia of plastic tubes and the ability to respond in a unique and remarkable way to human bodies.


The Birds, an installation piece inspired by the Hitchcock film

Examples of Anouk Wipprecht’s “wearable tech” include Fragilis, a dress that eerily mimics the function of the human heart and veins through motion and lighting (similar to the Heartbeat Dress, which conversely uses sound, recording the heartbeat of the model and relaying it to the audience through speakers embedded in the dress), and Intimacy, a set of garments that become more or less transparent and opaque in relation to their proximity to each other.

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“Biojewelry”: Grow Your Own Bone Wedding Rings

Several years ago, Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott, design researchers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College London, teamed up to create wedding bands from bone cells extracted from five volunteer couples.

According to a BBC News article, “The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.” After extracting the bone cells for culture, “These are fed with nutrients and grown on a ‘scaffold’ material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.” It was a “long and fragile” process, but basically took place in the following steps:

The process
1. Extract bone chips from jaw. Rinse.
2. Place bone cells in ring-shaped bioactive ceramic scaffold.
3. Feed liquid nutrients and culture in a temperature-controlled bioreactor for six weeks.
4. After coral-like bone forms fully around scaffold, pare down to final ring shape and insert silver liner (for engraving).

Of course, there is more potential for this project than just offbeat wedding rings made from the beloved’s own bone cells. It could eventually be used to grow bone replacements for implantation, so that the bone required to, say, repair a damaged jaw, wouldn’t have to be harvested from a piece of a rib or elsewhere in the body.

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The Gorgeous and Grotesque Art-Dolls of Nita Collins

Nita Collins’ doll-sculptures creep me out and exhilarate me. Disturbing, beautiful, verging on the grotesque, delicately crafted, flawlessly executed, melancholically tender, realistic to the point of being unnerving – adorned with puckered scars, ragged holes in chests, and a panoply of peculiar, unique marks on their flesh that seem to have come straight from Nita’s imagination and heart – the tortured, sweetly exquisite bodies and faces of these dolls are a singular, constant mixture of provocative and moving. They are lovingly scarred, divinely imagined, different from any other dolls I’ve seen. Nita Collins has a unique talent manifest in these gorgeous, poignant art-dolls.

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