Thread Love: 365 Lucky Days

i was searching through my daily dose of blogs and i stumbled upon A Beautiful Mess newest post which featured 365 Lucky Days, a creative project by Lucky Jackson an embroidery artist, to create an embroidery piece everyday for a year. she stitched the owner of a beautiful mess, elsie along with other bloggers, experiences, famous people, etc. i love that each week she does a theme, one of my favorite being "i think i love you but i'm a preteen and my mom says it's just hormones," which holds the likeness of a matt dillon, rob lowe, charlie sheen, and emilio estavez along with some others. here are a few amazing examples of her work.

amy sedaris 

Miss Modish

Miss James of Bleubird Vintage

loving this: dan mountford

saw this on design for mankind today. absolutely loving these double exposure photos. especially because i love triangles. dan mountford.

Yang Yongliang: Artificial Wonderland

Taking from the pictorial tradition of Chinese Shanshui ink paintings, photographer Yang Yongliang turns his photographs of Chinese construction and cityscapes into eerie mystical landscapes that mesh the old with the possible future. Incredibly beautiful!

i like this: handmade journals by derrick velasquez

this past weekend i went to art for cash poor at the crane arts building in philly and i fell in love with these hand bound journals by artist derrick velasquez. most of his books are bound with found fabrics and eco-friendly materials including recycled paper, but the ones that i loved were the silkscreened ones. the top photo is my favorite, and i was soooo close to buying it but i needed to save my money and i already have enough journals and notebooks that haven't even been touched. enjoy!

daniaelle simonsen

textile artist daniaelle simonsen's works of stitched magazine clippings and chiffon. amazing. here is her blog and here is her website to see all her work.

Little Tidbits: Winsor McCay and "Little Nemo"

i was in love with the movie Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland when i was younger, and i still have fond memories of watching it at my dad's with my sister, and having nightmares of the "nightmare king." in may i was told by a friend that the movie was based off a turn-of-the-century comic that was illustrated beautifully by Winsor McCay. after doing a little visual research i was totally surprised and fell even more in love with the story and with McCay's amazing illustrations.

i really enjoyed designing my children's wear print in the fall semester and i think that McCay's illustrations are definitely a unique and refreshing source of inspiration for an old fashioned-ish children's print. i could really see myself doing a print inspired by these in the near future.

artist spotlight: olafur eliasson

ok, so actually i would have to say that olafur eliasson is probably my favorite icelandic artist, well really icelandic-danish. i was instantly drawn to him when i first learned of him a few months ago, his experimentation with light, and his work with phenomenology. eliasson really creates complex optical illusions using simple instruments like water, light, mirrors, dirt, etc. his work is truly an experience and i really hope i get a chance to see his work soon.

Hrafnkell Sigurdsson

Artist Hrafnkell Sigurdsson is represented by i8 Gallery in Reykjavik. His mission as stated by the gallery, "Hrafnkell Sigurdsson’s work examines the transitory elements in man’s relationship with nature and plays with ideas of reversal and ritual. His photographic series include images of empty tents in the snow, houses under construction, garbage bags in the streets, and most recently, portraits of trash."

It is this notion of the transitory elements in the relationship between man and nature that I am interested in. What we do with the earth, what we leave behind, how nature can destroy or take over what we built in the past, and even how these things effect us emotionally are some ideas that I have been trying to unearth in my thoughts and in some of my pieces.

I am working on an exhibition for my Curatorial Methods class and it deals with some of these notions of past and present, architecture vs. nature. Icelandic artists tend to deal with these issues quite often because I believe it is in Iceland where these things are happening, and where the natural landscape has effected culture for a very long time.

Speaking of a Sensorium...

Artist Finnbogi Petursson deals with the use of technology to help us engage with our senses more visually and on a higher level. For example, many of his works attempt to capture sound in a visually, like his work pictured here entitled Circle, (1991). In Circle Petursson hung a speaker that transmitted sound waves directly above a pool of water and projected the ripples it created on the wall. In his Watertanks Series, the piece Fire-Air is also an attempt to visually reproduce sound through fire which is really mesmerizing.

Petursson's work and many other Icelandic artists, like Olafur Eliasson deal with nature and our senses. I find it very interesting that Petursson and Eliasson share very similar ideas, Eliasson has done a piece similar to Circle but it focuses more on the viewer's movement on rickety walkways that creates the ripples in the water.