books

Posts tagged
with books

Art

Ecosystems of Fungi and Coral Inhabit Vintage Books in Stéphanie Kilgast’s Intricate Sculptures

Fungi sprout from between pages, ivy creeps across a text, and the life cycle of a butterfly unfolds on the cover of a volume in Stéphanie Kilgast’s vibrant sculptures. Known for her intricately detailed works using discarded materials and trash like crushed cans or plastic bottles (previously), her recent pieces explore incredible biodiversity utilizing books as her canvas.

Millions of titles are published each year in the U.S. alone, meaning billions of individual copies—a vast number of which eventually end up in landfills. Kilgast draws attention to these discarded objects by giving vintage editions new life. She constructs delicate mushrooms, blooming flowers, and colorful coral in painstakingly detailed miniature environments as a vivid reminder of the impact humans have on the environment and the tenacity of nature.

The artist has an exhibition opening on November 5 at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, and you can find more of her work on her website and Instagram.

 

Art

Division of Birds: A Group Show at Paradigm Gallery Celebrates Feathered Life

The Division of Birds, housed inside Chicago’s Field Museum, boasts one of the largest scientific avian collections in the country, representing about 90% of the world’s genera and species and containing more than 480,000 specimens, 21,000 egg sets, and approximately 200 nests. A group show opening this month at Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Philadelphia references this unparalleled archive in a celebration of feathered life.

Curated by Colossal’s founder and editor-in-chief Christopher Jobson, Division of Birds is comprised of dozens of works in a range of styles and mediums. The show includes avian creatures both real and imagined and a vast array of aesthetics, from a trio of paper sculptures by Roberto Benavidez and Felicia Chiao’s emotionally charged illustrations to Lola Dupré’s collaged roosters and a three-dimensional nest embroidered by Megan Zaniewski.

Division of Birds runs from August 26 to September 18.

 

Art History Illustration Photography Science

A New Book Plunges into the Vast Diversity of the World’s Oceans Across 3,000 Years

Despite thousands of years of research and an unending fascination with marine creatures, humans have explored only five percent of the oceans covering the majority of the earth’s surface. A forthcoming book from Phaidon dives into the planet’s notoriously vast and mysterious aquatic ecosystems, traveling across the continents and three millennia to uncover the stunning diversity of life below the surface.

Spanning 352 pages, Ocean, Exploring the Marine World brings together a broad array of images and information ranging from ancient nautical cartography to contemporary shots from photographers like Sebastião Salgado and David Doubilet. The volume presents science and history alongside art and illustration—it features biological renderings by Ernst Haekcl, Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints, and works by artists like Kerry James Marshall, Vincent van Gogh, and Yayoi Kusama—in addition to texts about conservation and the threats the climate crises poses to underwater life.

Ocean will be released this October and is available for pre-order on Bookshop. You also might enjoy this volume devoted to birds.

 

Art History

Great Women Painters: An Enormous Volume Surveys the Work of 300 Artists Across 500 Years

In the same vein as Phaidon’s formidable Great Women Artists and African Artists, a forthcoming book from the publisher similarly widens the art historical canon while recognizing some of the most influential and impactful painters working in the medium today. The massive compilation, titled Great Women Painters, highlights more than 300 artists across 500 years and a vast array of movements and aesthetics. Arranged alphabetically, the book pairs icons like Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo, and Leonora Carrington with contemporary artists, including Ewa Juszkiewicz, Katharina Grosse, and Wangari Mathenge, in a broad and diverse overview of the women who have had profound impacts on the world today. The nearly 350-page Great Women Painters will be released this fall and is currently available for pre-order from Bookshop.

 

Craft Design

An Elaborately Designed Book on Weaving Opens to Reveal a Fully Functional Loom

The swish of a shuttle moving from left to right as it carries threads through the warp might be described as a “xui” sound. A Taiwanese onomatopoeia, the auditory word is also the title of Cai Wei Qun’s elaborately constructed book on the craft, which opens to reveal a trove of history, techniques and tricks, and an entire loom tucked between its covers.

The clever design is fully functional and able to produce tiny tapestries based on the patterns and practices described, making the book an immersive and accessible manual. “Traditional weaving tools are large and have complicated processes,” Wei Qun tells Colossal. “It is commonly difficult to experience. So we hope, by experiencing simple weaving processes, one can initiate ‘interest’ during the process (and) thoroughly understand the culture of weaving.”

Wei Qun was recently awarded a Red Dot Design Award for the conceptual project, and you can find much more on the designer’s website and Instagram. (via Yanko Design)

 

Photography

Street Photographer Matt Stuart’s Incredibly Serendipitous Images Collected in a New Book

Armed with his Leica and an extraordinary amount of patience, Matt Stuart ventures through the streets of cities worldwide to capture the unexpected and coincidental moments of everyday life. His practice revolves around finding humor, play, and serendipity in the mundane, a skill he’s cultivated throughout his 25-year career and recounts in the recently released volume Think Like a Street Photographer.

Published by Laurence King, the book pairs 100 of Stuart’s images with detailed descriptions of his process. “My general outlook is, get up, get out and go and find things. I try to summon an excitement and amazement for life,” he writes. “Ultimately, you need to remember how lucky you are to be walking around with a strange black box looking at things, making a record of them, and bringing them home. It’s a privilege.”

Think Like a Street Photographer is available from Bookshop, and you can find select prints in Stuart’s shop. To explore a larger archive of his work, visit Instagram. (via LensCulture)