Mood Board #1: The Loo

I have a few Home Improvement projects to do, so I've been collecting images. I'm puting a mood board together for each project! I'm going to start with the bathroom, I have the ugliest bathroom ever! The tile is like grey/beige...greige? But I think I'm going to be able to work with that. I'm painting the walls a light grey and the trim a creamy ivory. I think espresso towels will add a nice touch! I have lots of clear glass apothecary jars to fill and natural objects to display. Here are some images that have inspired me...

I snatched this one from flickr...but I can't remember who?




Above and below: Sophie Pretelat's 'Anges et Demons' installation at the Place de la Bastille, Paris...found via Blood Milk







A full-size recreation of 17th Century naturalist Olaus Worm’s Wunderkammer by artist Rosamond Purcell

Ruven Afanador

Surrealism can be credited with having pointed the way to a current revival of interest in wunderkammer...the return of curiosity as the repressed in science. It was suggested that the repeated return to curiosity in the twentieth century might constitute a kind of counterbalance to its positivist and technocratic tendencies. Walter Benjamin stated that the surrealists were the first to discover a revolutionary potential in the obsolete and the outmoded, in the material by-products and refuse of modernity.



Featured in Elle Italia, November 2008, photographed by Ruven Afanador.



Thanks for the link Pam! Phantasamaphile.

Mark Dion

Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy

"Recalling the short-lived Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes of 1924–1925—part information centre and ‘public relations’ office, and part surrealist archive—Mark Dion trawled the Manchester Museum’s own collections and found the raw material for this book and an installation in the museum. Renowned for his work exploring taxonomy, archaeology and ecology, in Bureau Mark Dion documents his opportunistic encounters with the Museum of Manchester’s neglected drawers and overlooked recesses that are home to redundant labels, orphaned mounts, defunct teaching models, botanical freaks, Egyptian fakes and the minutiae that have fallen through the cracks of museum practice and lain abandoned. Dion’s Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy is both a repository for the detritus of museum life and a working process, classifying the museum’s un-classifiable whilst exploring the bureaucratic workings of the institution."

Mark Dion’s Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, which opened at the Manchester Museum in May 2005 is now on permanent display at the Museum!

Matthew Barney

You are looking at a still from The Cremaster Cycle, a series of 5 short films by Matthew Barney (Bjork's baby daddy). The still is from my favorite part of the series-Cremaster 5. The scene is called "A Dance for the Queen's Menagerie"

I suggest viewing the Cremaster Cycle before reading the synopsis. It's almost impossible find on DVD but you can find much of it on YouTube. I'd really love to see this on a big screen though...the sets, costumes, and scores are incredible!

le merveilleux

Art historian Hal Foster argues that the marvellous – ‘a state at once otherworldly, secular, and psychic’ – can also be understood as the phenomenon Freud termed ‘the uncanny’, which Foster regards, from the perspective of Surrealism, as the ‘return of the repressed for disruptive purposes’. By this means, these psychic explorers sought to achieve what Foster calls ‘the re-enchantment of a disenchanted world, of a capitalist society made ruthlessly rational’.

Andy Paiko

The talented Andy Paiko was brought to my attention a few years back when he was comissioned by D.L. & Co. to make an Absinithe Fountain. His current body of work is influenced by Cabinets of Curiosity! Feast your eyes on these bell jars! Oh Desire...

Shop Update!

I've just listed some amazing Black Forest Relics in my Etsy shop! The Crow claw is my design, the others are antique. The talon and claw sold right after I listed them, but the Little Teeth and Raven Beak are still available!