Elegant Animal Head Urns of Ceramic and Wood by Artist Lorien Stern

Lorien Stern comes from Ojai, a small town in Southern California. She recently received her BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, where she focused on ceramics, painting, claymation, screen printing, wood turning, piñatas, and egg batiking. Experimenting in various mediums, her animal urns are what caught my eye. They combine white ceramic animal heads with turned wood and are simultaneously whimsical and sophisticated. Whether used as actual cremation urns or merely objets'd'art, they are definitely unique.

“Penguin Urn” (10” x 3.5” x 3.5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2013)


“Alligator Urn” (8” x 3.5” x 3.5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2013)




“Bear Urn” (10” x 3.5” x 3.5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2013)


“Horse Urn” (10” x 3.5” x 3.5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2013)



“St. Bernard Urn” (9” x 5” x 5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2013)


“Bull Urn” (12.25” x 6.5” Ceramic and American Poplar 2010)




Lorien Stern (above) now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. (image courtesy of Facebook)

Lorien works in has a fun series of large and small "animal heads" that you should check out at her website.

Shop her etsy store here

The World's Largest Crochet Sculpture & Crochetdermy by Shauna Richardson.

above: Shauna Richardson stands by her Lionheart project, the world's largest crochet sculpture

Artist Shauna Richardson turns game hunters into knit wits with her mounted animal heads and animal statues made of hand crocheted knits. Taking the old tradition of taxidermy and giving it a politically correct and artful spin, she creates life-sized and oversized sculptures that blend craft, realism and collecting.

I will first share with you her Crochetdermy mounted heads and animal sculptures, followed by her Lionheart project, featuring the world's largest crochet sculpture.

Crochetdermy





















The Lionheart Project

In 2009 Shauna won ‘Artists taking the lead’ part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad with the ‘Lionheart Project’.



For two years she has been creating the largest single-handed crochet sculpture in the world, three giant lions.






The finished piece will be housed in this mobile glass taxidermy style truck case and tour throughout 2012:

The building of the glass case:



Tour Dates
Shauna Richardson’s ‘Lionheart Project’ has announced its UK tour, which will see three giant crocheted lions travelling the country in a 16 metre long illuminated glass case (shown above). Starting on 1 May 2012 at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, the three giant lions will tour the East Midlands before arriving at the Natural History Museum in London in time for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Harking back to a travelling menagerie show, the lions will also visit venues in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northampton and Nottingham, calling in at events such as SO Festival and Twycross Zoo. The lions will reach out to an estimated audience of over half a million visitors across all venues, with countless more sightings when they take to the road.
Learn more about the Lionheart Project.

About the artist:



Shauna Richardson’s background is in conceptual art. The unique body of work she terms ‘Crochetdermy’ evolved out of the exploration of the theory that ‘Anything can be art’. She uses crochet to sculpt realistic life-size animals – uncanny taxidermy-like forms. Crochetdermy combines themes such as objects, collecting, craft and realism and experiments with accessibility and audience. Richardson has received much critical acclaim. Her work is receiving worldwide media coverage and selling into collections across the globe.

Despite the enormity of the Olympic Lionheart project in the last six months Shauna has managed to fit in a very unofficial portrait of Prince Harry commissioned by the Guardian Weekend Magazine, and winning ‘Best Sculpture’ and the ‘Overall Gold Award’ at Art of Giving held at the Saatchi Gallery.

She will is presently exhibiting the life-size brown bear (shown below) in ‘The Power of Making’ at the V&A – Sept 2011 – Jan 2012.




images courtesy of the artist. Additional lionheart project images courtesy of Inspire LeicesterShire

Crochetdermy pieces are created to commission. Selected works on her site are available for purchase.

Shauna Richardson

Brand Trophies (Gucci, Nike, LV, Cartier & More) By Artist Pucci de Rossi

above: Gucci is written in the stylized horns of Rossi's Shopping trophy

What at first appear to be stylized wall mounted animal head trophies made of steel, wood, ceramic, plaster and leather, when examined more closely, contain famous brand names such as Cartier, Gucci, Prada, LV, Danone, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Nike and more (some surreptitiously) within the horns.


above: Nike swooshes are hidden within the wooden stag horns

Pucci de Rossi's Brand Trophies, also referred to as 'Shopping Trophies' or 'Metropolitan Trophies', are a commentary on marketing and a comparison of contemporary art with the tradition of hunting*. A surrealistic representation of how trademarks and brand names have infiltrated our society to such a point that they have attained an almost mythical significance. Even when taken out of their natural context, separated from the products they represent, they continue to have loyalty and value attached to them.


above: Installation view at the galerie Anne de Villepoix

Each trophy is hand-crafted and there are multiple versions of certain pieces in various materials as you will see from the images below. The show exhibited at galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris under the name of Têtes bizardes » (trophées de chasse métropolitains) in 2003.

Gucci:


Prada:


Louis Vuitton:

Cartier:

Fendi:

Dior:

Coca Cola:

McDonalds:


Nike:

Nike -Texas:

Danone:

Others in the collection are simply ornate:


*An article about the series written by Alexandra Senes
Brand Tyranny


above: Pucci de Rossi (photo: Anne-Sophie Granjon)

The designer Pucci de Rossi, a sort of Italian Gyro Gearloose (the Disney-created madcap inventor) has always tended to joke about everything. The focus is now on his provocative logo sculptures. 

Hunting in Le Marais district of Paris: magnificent and disconcerting, weird sculptures are growing on the walls of a Parisian gallery in the "Shopping Trophies" exhibition. These trophies, with their sensuous and erotic curves, like some kind of extra-terrestrial fauna slain in the course of an imaginary hunt, are set to disconcert us by exhibiting between their antlers familiar logos such as those of Nike, MacDonald’s, Cartier, Gucci and Prada. 

Their creator, Pucci de Rossi, has always pushed luxury to its limits, asserting both its usefulness and uselessness.

This time, he alienates everyday realities from their usual meaning by juxtaposing them with their apparent opposites: nature versus culture… brand culture. A tone of cynical derision together with a craftsman’s expertise testifies to the symptoms of an industrial society polluted by logos which endlessly invade our field of vision. Values which consumers, for want of any clear direction, identify with when making their purchases. Values which have become a refuge in a world that is undergoing an identity crisis.


Customisation in limited series.
These sculptures display a panorama of an era. Through them, Pucci questions and subverts the image of advertising. These luxury brands, trophies of a kind (an insult to the language of hunting), which we flaunt more or less ostentatiously, these exotic antlers are the mouthpiece for anti-consumerist messages. With the arrogance of a seasoned "domestic hunter", Pucci sets out to explore and reflect on this. Now that he has got over the monochromatic silence of his minimalist period, his liberated and unpretentious trophies speak out amid the cacophony of provocative logos. Pucci uses these capitalist symbols and logos as the instrument of his revolt. "We are all prostitutes who’ll go with the first punter."

Far removed from political manifestos, his art plays with the customisation of limited series, and his sculptures stage an ephemeral image of a certain section of our society. In keeping with this sense of humour, these logos are an inspiration to the imagination, showing how an independent mentality could be exhibited. Depending on your mood, you could exhibit your fascination with chaos and your hatred of confusion on a wall in your apartment. Provocatively, Pucci takes a particular prop or pretext and invents a new form of media, developed from his work: creative resistance to globalisation. "Globalisation is a subject I find both troubling and challenging and which I considered sufficiently important for me to tackle and do something with."

Exorcising the marketing element 
"Paradoxically, by exhibiting these brands, I am, in effect, glorifying them. But it is also an animal that I have slain and defeated. A way of exorcising it." Being allergic to marketing, he does not censor himself: from his condemnation of the power of multinationals to anti-globalisation demonstrations, everything is the object of his critique. And should one suspect him of wanting to "act like a cheap salesman", he transforms his client into a vengeful buyer who ends up by following him, willingly, thanks to his lively language that overrides jargon. (published in magazine Jealous n°64, Octobre 2003)

images courtesy of the artist, made75 and the gallery

Pucci de Rossi