Image © Glass Symphony
Kyiv-based artist Nikita Drachuk (previously) is behind a delicate menagerie of translucent octopuses, striped spiders, and mottled slugs exquisitely crafted in glass. Elaborately shaped with curling tentacles and segmented legs, the miniature creatures are the product of lampworking, which involves melting the colorful material with a lamp or torch. Drachuk works under the moniker Glass Symphony and has hundreds of pieces available on Etsy.
Animals and nature are united in the art of Michael Jones. The UK-based tree surgeon-turned-artist crafts realistic sculptures of different creatures from timber. His company Man and His Dog Carvings specializes in making bespoke wood carvings of animals big and small.
Jones discovered his love for this craft in college and, after working as a tree surgeon for a number of years and developing a client base, he found a way to make his passion a full-time career. Now, he is commissioned by people from around the UK to produce custom sculptures in a range of sizes and designs.
Detail of “Vena #9” (2021), porcelain paperclay and glaze, 24 × 8 × 18 inches. Photo by Jeanne Donegan
At once rigidly skeletal and imbued with rhythmic movement, the porcelain sculptures that comprise Shiyuan Xu’s Growth series are intricate recreations of single-celled organisms, molecules, and other micro lifeforms. The Chinese artist hand-builds delicate ceramic works of three-dimensional webbing that swell and surges into amorphous shapes mimicking a range of living creatures. Stretching up to two feet, the enlarged, abstract sculptures incorporate both the universal nature of evolution and change, while directly tying to Xu’s background. “My attempt of using the classical Chinese blue and white and celadon color palette in a contemporary way reflects my own narratives, life experience, and cultural heritage” she shares, explaining further:
The regular and irregular structures and layers of my piece blend in with the memory of my sensations and personal experience. The repetitive and labor-intensive process seems to be a therapy to ease my anxiety and sense of uncertainty while facing constant challenges in the intersections of two cultures.
To create each piece, Xu undertakes a laborious process that involves applying a heavy glaze and then using a knife to scratch the edges away.
Image © Amanda Cobbett
Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.
Images © Ayumi Shibata
Japan-based artist Ayumi Shibata (previously) designs intricate landscapes using layers upon layers of white paper. Some of her sculptures are miniature, whereas others are immersive installations, and all are brought to life with the play of light and shadow, which create “movement” throughout her pieces. The works feature architectural domes, cave-like forests, and swirling suns hovering over tree-filled cities. These picturesque places aren’t based on a particular location but what the artist “hopes and believes the future of the planet could look like”.
Shibata’s ethereal landscapes envision a world in which humans and natural forms coexist, and she describes her pieces as having a “Yin and Yang” element. Paper represents Yin, the material, and the ways the works emit shadows correlates to Yang, the invisible world. “The light represents spirit and life, how the sun rises and breathes life into the world,” she explains. “I believe my pieces are a place to observe the material world and the visible one.”
Image © Goran Konjevod
Whether folding flat, square tessellations or rounded forms that billow from a central point, origami artist Goran Konjevod (previously) focuses on the tension inherent in a single sheet of material. His sculptures draw on his background in mathematics and computer science and configure precise geometries, fanned pleats, and small woven pieces that appear to be individual strips threaded together rather than a series of carefully aligned creases. Each form is a meticulous blend of texture, pattern, and dimension that’s translated into elegant, abstract constructions through repetitive folds.
The wild fibers coffee table
driven by an inner fascination with the essence of movement as well as curiosity about malleable yet strong natural materials, aurelie hoegy creates a wide range of powerful works breaking barriers between normality and abnormality. the french artist and designer uses movement as a medium and embodies it through her extensive work, which includes limited edition objects, installations, furniture, and lighting pieces. using sustainable organic materials, like rattan fibers, the designer shapes matter into what seems like a wild choreography in space or a graceful aerial ocean wave. ‘I’m letting myself be guided by the movement of the fiber itself, all at once shaping matter into an architecture of the body in movement,’ she mentions.
After a brutal storm, Italian sculptor Marco Martalar was moved to transform the damage into something beautiful. Sitting atop a mountain in the northern Trentino region of Italy, an enormous dragon has become a symbol of Mother Nature’s force. Martalar created the magnificent creature from the scattered branches of the storm, turning tragedy into art.
In 2018, the Vaia storm ripped across northern Italy. With winds reaching up to 125 miles per hour, a tremendous amount of forest was destroyed. In Trentino alone, over 18,000 trees were uprooted by the devastating storm, which was unprecedented. Vaia had a profound effect on Martalar, changing the way that he viewed his art. “The type of sculpture that I was doing before no longer made sense,” he tells My Modern Met. “So I started using what the storm had destroyed and gave it new life as art.”
Anila Quayyum Agha, “Shimmering Mirage,” lacquered steel and halogen bulb, 36” x 36” x 36”, 2016. Installation at June Collins Smith Museum, Auburn, AL, 2021. (Photo credit: Mike Cortez)
Pakistani American artist Anila Quayyum Agha uses her many varied experiences as inspiration for her incredible installation art. She constructs intricate cubes that, when illuminated, cast beautiful Islamic patterns on all sides of the room. Not only do these precious lanterns explore the visible dynamic between light and shadow, but they also embody other polarities such as masculine and feminine, and religious and secular.
Originally from Pakistan, Anila has been living and exhibiting her art in the United States since she received her MFA from the University of North Texas. “Having lived on the boundaries of different faiths such as Islam and Christianity, and in cultures like Pakistan and USA, my art is deeply influenced by the simultaneous sense of alienation and transience that informs the migrant experience,” Agha explains to My Modern Met.
Image © Larysa Bernhardt
In a cozy studio overlooking a garden in Blackwell, Missouri, artist Larysa Bernhardt creates colorful moth sculptures with a needle and thread. Her fabric creatures are embroidered with old tapestries, often portraying historical people, animals, and delicate botanical forms on their wings: one specimen with a rusty orange abdomen depicts a little bird taking flight, while another is blue with a Medieval woman looking at a flower.
Able to stand on their own or hang from the wall, the handmade moths feature eyes made from Czech glass beads and bodies of cotton velvet and Belgian linen. Bernhardt also wires their wings, enabling people to shape them into their desired position.
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