Jason deCaires Taylor has spent more than a decade crafting underwater sculptures that create living reefs, improving the surrounding ecosystem at a time when 40 percent of coral reefs have disappeared over the past decades. His recent pieces including 48 life-sized figures in Indonesian waters and a recently installed an initial phase of his underwater art museum, The Coralarium. Taylor last appeared on HiFructose.com here.
During the past couple years, the sculptor’s work has been attached to controversy, for how similar Damien Hirst’s recent work appears to Taylor’s. Hirst was accused of lifting Taylor’s aesthetic. “After viewing Hirst’s latest exhibition it seems I have certainly created an art genre that has been responded to, but his marine facsimiles are very different in context from my living installations,” Taylor said at the time. “If people really want to see ‘unbelievable treasures’ they should look below the surface of our seas at the real live wonders of the blue world—nature does not lie.”
See more of Taylor’s work below.
Maud Vantours explores the infinite possibilities of paper with her elaborate 3D sculptures, which turn a seemingly ordinary material into extraordinary art. Her meticulous process involves carefully hand cutting and superimposing layers of paper onto one another to create multidimensional objects that are rich in texture and volume.
In a major installation at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, Christopher Langton built his own immersive system of celestial bodies, robots, and organisms resembling viruses and fungi. “The hyperreal manifestation of Langton’s own recent experiences beset by life-threatening disease and infection, ‘Colony’ beckons us to consider that we are all multi-cellular symbiotic organisms, negotiating a precarious shared ecology,” the gallery says.
In her ceramic sculptures, Janet Beckhouse taps into ancient contemplations on life, death, and nature. Though at times disconcerting, with writhing floral elements enveloping her figures, each work is executed with elegance. Beckhouse crafts these sculptures in both towering and handheld scales.