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Category: Sculpture & Installations

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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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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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Jessica Harrison’s “Breaking” Series

In this series of ceramic sculptures, artist Jessica Harrison undermines and perverts the kitschy sentimentality of porcelain figurines by “breaking” them, casting a macabre twist on the familiar decorative art form. 19th-century ladies with vacantly blithe expressions hold their own severed, gory-edged head in their lap, gaily dangle their bloody eyeballs above them, and with fleshless, skeletal face recline daintily on a chaise longue. I would love to have these doll-sculptures in my home, they are such clever miniature subversions of prim and happy porcelain figurines, having a dimension of interest that the traditional harmlessly sweet figurines never possess.

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Mandy Greer

Mandy Greer creates installations and pieces of fashion art portraying “mystically driven and darkly beautiful” worlds, the studied chaos of entanglements at once symbolic and material, and deals with motherhood, eroticism, human relations to nature, and mythology in her intricate works.

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Edo-Period Pregnancy Dolls

These obstetrical dolls from 19th-century Edo (modern-day Tokyo) were used to educate midwives on the delivery of babies, as well as to entertain the public at sideshow carnivals known as misemono. Realistic and articulated, some of them even included models of the fetus in various stages of its development.