July 7, 2013

Diet Wiegman’s shadow sculptures

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 3:10 pm

Diet Wiegman (b. 1944) is an artist from Schiedam who creates sculptures that acquire an extra layer of meaning when light is cast upon them.

In English: his seemingly shapeless sculptures cast shadows that look Michelangelo’s David, Michael Jackson or the Venus de Milo.

Petapixel writes:

Using garbage, pieces of glass and other rubble, he creates a sculpture that, with the help of a light source, projects a beautiful image onto a wall.

You can stare at the photos for a very long time (trust us, we have) and it still won’t make sense that a carefully arranged pile of recycled items can produce Michelangelo’s David. Or that a pile of broken glass and a few other items can somehow produce a beautiful image of a sunset.

(Photo: Diet Wiegman’s Tumblr, where you can find many more examples of his art)

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December 16, 2012

Temporary carpet made of bottles

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 12:19 pm

We Make Carpets is an art project in which the artists use everyday objects to create temporary carpets. The carpet shown above was made of bottles and was displayed at the Taragalte Festival 2012 in M’hamid, Morocco.

The collective We Make Carpets consists of Marcia Nolte, Stijn van der Vleuten and Bob Waardenburg. Their base materials are “products that normally have no value once they have been used, such as plastic forks, plasters, paving tiles, pasta, cotton balls and pegs”.

(Photo: We Make Carpets)

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February 14, 2012

Travelling rubbish museum supports cleaners’ plight

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 11:50 am

Street combing is cool, but then so is calling rubbish art and exhibiting it at big venues, including the city hall of Heerlen, Limburg. Starting today, visitors there can have a look all kinds of things collected by cleaners who are trying to attract attention to issues such as being paid for sick leave and getting more respect.

This travelling exhibition already seen in The Hague, Groningen and Utrecht tells stories about some 1,000 found objects such as a gold bracelet, a can of cola, a teddy bear and a syringue. The idea is that cleaners reflect our society and are indispensable, while they are not treated fairly despite the relatively well-organised Dutch labour system. Cleaners all over the country have been striking as well to get their point across.

(Link: www.limburger.nl)

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February 12, 2012

‘Street comber’ Krista Peeters makes one piece of art out of garbage per day

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:33 am

Krista Peeters calls herself the straatjutter, the ‘street comber’, and every day she makes one small art piece of stuff she finds on the street.

She keeps track of where her finds come from. The piece shown here is called ‘Why, thank you, they’re lovely! Let me get a vase…’, and was created from garbage found on 10 February 2012 on the Dapperstraat in Amsterdam: fake grass, a plastic thingamajig, 3 buttons, a lamp holder, a thumbtack, a plastic cap, half a bike light, something technical, and a bent safety pin.

According to Bright the artist is currently looking for a place where she can exhibit a year’s worth of works by March.

See also: “On the beaches of Texel only left shoes are ever found” (about the Netherlands’ beach combing culture).

(Photo of Friday’s art work by Krista Peeters)

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April 25, 2011

Modern still lifes by Richard Kuiper

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 10:54 am

Behold this 17th century painting, the delightful play of dark and light. Except it is not a painting, or even from the 17th century, as Hans Aarsman points out:

Look carefully now. Doesn’t the dark grey tablecloth look remotely familiar? It’s a plastic bin bag, just torn from the roll, the folds unmistakably plastic bin bag folds. The plates are made of plastic too. The lemon, the cans, everything is made of plastic. Close examination will reveal the casting seams. The fish is inflatable.

This doesn’t celebrate the old, it celebrates the here and now.

(Photo: Richard Kuiper)

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April 17, 2008

Stairs made from a castle’s floorwood

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 10:41 am

Recycled furniture – furniture clearly made from recycled materials – got very popular in the Netherlands sometime in the 1990s when an artist found out that a regular cupboard made from new materials would easily net multiple times the price if made from recycled wood. Despite the over-saturation of this market I like this staircase made by Jan Korbes from the Hague by turning old floorboards of Schloss Wiesenburg (Wiesenburg Castle) in Germany into boxes.

Via BoingBoing.

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November 27, 2007

Animal sculptures from rusty old tools

Filed under: Animals,Art by Branko Collin @ 11:48 pm

Joshua Pennings is an artist from Grave, Noord-Brabant who makes animal sculptures from rusty, discarded tools and parts. The size of these works ranges from a couple cubic decimeters to a couple cubic meters.

Via BoingBoing.

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