Thousands of Structures Populate a Growing Whimsical Metropolis in Charles Young’s Miniature Cities

All images © Charles Young, shared with permission

After picking up a copy of Japanese artist Sanzo Wada’s A Dictionary of Color Combinations a few years ago, Charles Young decided to divert the course of his otherwise monochromatic body of work. The Scottish artist, who is currently based in Edinburgh, has accumulated an extensive archive of tiny buildings, transportation, and public architecture all created in white paper. The stark structures number well into the thousands and together, sprawl into massive miniature metropolises. They’re now joined by similarly sized creations in full color.

Published around 1930, Wada’s reference manual groups pigments into complementary combinations of two, three, or four, and Young uses these pairings as the foundation for his latest models of office buildings, churches, factories, and stations. He finished all of the four-color studies back in 2021 and has since moved on to those with three, a set he plans to wrap up in the new year. “The whole project is like a journal or sketchbook, and not much planning goes into each piece before I start work,” he says. “The project is really about the process and the massing of individual parts rather than each individual building.”

After formulating a general idea of the intended piece, Young prints each hue onto a single sheet of watercolor paper. “I’ll choose one of the colours to be the main feature, used in the walls, and others as accents or for the roofs. It’s a kind of intuitive process where there just seems to be a right way to do it,” he shares. Once cut and assembled into their final three-dimensional shapes, the works are either left as standalone structures or animated in whimsical, stop-motion movements, like a train spinning on its platform or an excavator dipping its bucket.

As mentioned, Young’s three-color studies are ongoing, and you can follow his progress on those on Instagram.

 

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Quirky Clothesline Creatures Saunter Across Helga Stentzel’s Landscape Illusions

“Laundrosaurus.” All images © Helga Stentzel, shared with permission

A wooly sweater returns to its material roots in the latest creatures to spring from Helga Stentzel’s clothesline menagerie. The London-based artist captivated audiences last year with her whimsically strung farm animals that appeared to put old shirts and jackets out to pasture. Now, Stentzel’s collection of characters includes a dinosaur of bleached white undergarments, a sweatpants camel, and the aforementioned sweater sheep. Positioned against expansive views of deserts and mountainous areas, the stylish illusions take a playful approach to laundry day.

Alongside these creatures, Stentzel has been creating 3D works, some of which are on view at CXC Art Museum in Seoul. Pick up a print in her shop, and follow her on Instagram to keep an eye on the additions to what the artist terms “household surrealism.”

 

“Zelda” (2022)

“Inky”

“Baa-baa-ra” (2022)

“Camella” (2022)

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Delicate Spikes and Lush Petals Bloom from Avital Avital’s Voluptuous Porcelain Vessels

All images © Avital Avital, shared with permission

The diverse world of plants and flowers is a source of fascination for ceramic artist Avital Avital, who crafts delicately detailed vessels from porcelain. In her studio in Ramat Gan, Israel, the artist sculpts slender petals, fragile spikes, and orbs dabbed with confectionary-like dots. She is interested in the relationship between functionality and decoration, drawing on the rich history of clay as a medium and mingling technical skill with conceptual ideas.

Inspired by nature’s boundless variety of forms and colors, her choice of material complements her subject matter: “I am interested in balancing between the delicacy of the porcelain and its strength and to use its potential transparency by sculpting colorful petals that are skin-like when directed to a source of light.”

You can find more of Avital’s work on Instagram.

 

 

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New Banksy Works Emerge Among the Destruction in Ukraine

All images shared with permission

Banksy (previously) has been traveling through the battle-scarred streets of Ukraine, producing a slew of works directly confronting Russia’s unwarranted and unjust aggression. The elusive street artist’s signature stencils have been spotted among the rubble of bombed buildings and barricades in Borodyanka and Gorenka, both in the Bucha Region, while others are just outside the capital city of Kyiv. Each centers on the strength and resiliency of the Ukrainian people.

The works broadly criticize the ongoing war and its disastrous effects on the everyday lives of citizens, depicting a woman outfitted with hair rollers, a bathrobe, and a gas mask grasping a fire extinguisher, a bearded man scrubbing his back in an open-air bathtub, and silhouettes of young children teeter-tottering on a left-behind hunk of steel. Perhaps the most pointed piece is that of a young boy slamming Russian President Vladimir Putin to the ground during a judo match—according to the BBC, Putin has projected an interest in the sport.

Banksy has only shared one work of a gymnast doing a handstand on Instagram so far, although a few others have appeared on the anonymous artist’s Gross Domestic Product account. This is the first time Banksy has emerged since the Spraycation series 15 months ago.

 

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Tiers of Dyed Water Burst into Perfectly Concentric Circles in Jack Long’s Energetic Photos

All images © Jack Long, shared with permission

For at least a decade, Jack Long has paired his day job in advertising photography with a growing archive of personal projects that explore the energetic, dynamic qualities of liquid. His latest series centers on circular pools of water that splash outward, creating colorfully tiered layers that build up the dimension of a typically gravity-bound material. Although the liquid appears to be spraying outward after being punctured by an object dropped from above, it is actually gurgling upward from a custom-designed fountain. Long shares with Colossal that the machine took about two years to build and produces pools that reach about 30 inches in diameter, which he has to photograph within a fraction of a second to capture the perfectly concentric effect.

You can find more of Long’s hypnotic works on Behance, Instagram, and his site.

 

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Nathalie Miebach Weaves Data and Anecdotes into Expansive Sculptures to Raise Awareness of the Climate Crisis

“Harvey’s Twitter SOS” (2019), paper, wood, vinyl, and data, 84 x 108 x 12 inches. All images © Nathalie Miebach, shared with permission

For Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach, art is a way to translate scientific data into a visual language of patterns and relationships. In 2007, when she first began to make works that explored weather and climate change, she wanted to better understand the science. “Each piece began with a specific question I had and then the sculpture would attempt to answer it. Over time, I began to be more interested not in how weather instruments record weather, but how we as a species respond to it,” she tells Colossal. “That’s when I began to look at extreme weather events such as floods, storms, and fires.”

Basketweaving plays a central role in Miebach’s practice as it both physically and metaphorically weaves together materials and information. The type of data she collects is both statistical and anecdotal, combining scientific inquiry with personal experiences. “Harvey’s Twitter SOS,” for example, translates 2017 data maps about Hurricane Harvey published by The New York Times. “The inner quilt is made up of shapes that map out income distribution in Houston and uses the city’s highway system as a visual anchor. Various types of information related to Harvey are stitched onto the quilt, including Twitter messages that were sent out during the storm,” she says. Each piece contains numerous pathways, repetitions, and connections, redolent of Rube Goldberg machines in which cause and effect play a central role.

During the past three years, the artist’s work also collates Covid-19 data alongside climate information. “Spinning Towards a New Normal,” on view currently at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, translates Covid-19 infection, death, and vaccination rates for Germany, Italy, and Spain into the form of a spinning top with a plumb bob, representing the struggle of communities and economies to find stability. “We are not invincible, and neither is this planet,” she warns. “For the first time in human history, we have all experienced how vulnerable we can be as a species. The recent work I have been doing is trying to look at these broader environmental changes we are now seeing through this lens of vulnerability.”

You can see Miebach’s work in All Hands On: Basketry at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin through May 25, 2023, and Climate Action, Inspiring Change at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, through June 25, 2023. Explore more of her work on her website and follow updates on Instagram.

 

“Spinning Towards a New Normal” (2022), reed, wood, and data, 20 x 20 x 25 inches

Detail of “Harvey’s Twitter SOS”

Details of “Spinning Towards a New Normal”

“Changing Lines” (2022), paper, wood, and data, 120 x 96 x 10 inches

“She Cast Her Circles Wide” (2016), rope, paper, wood, and data, 25 x 25 x 27 inches

Detail of “Harvey’s Twitter SOS”

“The Blindness of Seeing Patterns” (2021), paper, wood, and weather and Covid-19 data, 84 x 60 x 6 inches

Details of “The Blindness of Seeing Patterns”

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