The Porcelain of Kate MacDowell

Kate MacDowell is able, through her work, to show the deep conflict between our legacy with nature and the impact our ways of living have on the environment. It allows you to think how mankind, through all history, has always been bound to animals and plants not only for survival but in a spiritual way and how that bond is being thrown away by consumerism.

"I hand sculpt each piece out of porcelain, often building a solid form and then hollowing it out. Smaller forms are built petal by petal, branch by branch and allow me the chance to get immersed in close study of the structure of a blossom or a bee. I chose porcelain for its luminous and ghostly qualities as well as its strength and ability to show fine texture. It highlights both the impermanence and fragility of natural forms in a dying ecosystem, while paradoxically, being a material that can last for thousands of years and is historically associated with high status and value. I see each piece as a captured and preserved specimen, a painstaking record of endangered natural forms and a commentary on our own culpability." - Kate MacDowell

http://www.katemacdowell.com/

The animal world of Sayaka Kajita Ganz

By using kitchen utensils, toys and metal objects Sayaka Kajita Ganz gives new life to the animal world in a very ecological way as she selects objects that have been used and discarded. In the Japanese Shinto religion it is believed that all objects and organisms have spirits and through this belief she makes each object to transcend its origins by being integrated into the form of an animal or some other organism that seems alive and in motion.

http://www.sayakaganz.com/Home.html.

Ron Mueck

Ronald "Ron" Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom.

Early work

Ron Mueck began his career working on the Australian children's television program Shirl's Neighbourhood. He was the creative director and made, voiced and operated the puppets Greenfinger the Garden Gnome, Ol' Possum, Stanley the snake and Claude the Crow amongst many others. The show was made for Channel 7 Melbourne between 1979 and 1984, broadcast nationally and starred the ex-lead singer ofSkyhooks, Graeme "Shirley" Strachan.

Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo, and the Jim Henson series The Storyteller.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

Sculptor

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academythe following year. Dead Dad is a silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two-year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat, and Swaddled Baby.[1]

In 2002 his sculpturePregnant Womanwas purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for A$800,000.

Rosetta's Sculptures

Her sleek, hard-edged sculptures reflect Rosetta's life-long love of creating in three dimensions, a passionate pursuit of excellence, inspiration from the concepts of power, nobility and beauty in nature, and the ability to capture the fluid life force of her animal subjects. A fellow of the National Sculpture Society and member of the Society of Animal Artists, the Northwest Rendezvous Group and American Women Artists, Rosetta has won awards from these organizations as well as from the Allied Artists of America, Bennington Center for the Arts, Pen & Brush, Inc. and the Bosque Conservatory Art Council, among others. Exhibitions include solo shows at the Brevard Museum of Art and Science in Melbourne, FL, Indiana University, Southwestern Michigan College, Southern Oregon State College and Gallery Americana in Carmel, CA, and group shows at Brookgreen Gardens, Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo, The Smithsonian Institution, National Academy of Design, National Museum of Wildlife Art, North American Sculpture Exhibition, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, California Museum of Art, J.N. Bartfield Gallery in NYC, Albuquerque Museum of Art and "Feline Fine" traveling exhibition. Commissions include the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in WI, Brookgreen Gardens in SC, MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Hewlett-Packard, Chapman University in CA, Florida Institute of Technology, ArtWorks in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), The Shops at Walnut Creek (shopping center) in Westminster, CO and the cities of Steamboat Springs, CO, Loveland, CO, Lakewood, CO, and Dowagiac, MI.

Support for Conservation: Rosetta has donated sculptures to the African Wildlife Foundation, the Cheetah Conservation Fund and the private wildlife preserve, Shambala, for the purpose of fundraising, with only the casting and shipping costs retained by the artist.

http://www.natureartists.com/rosetta.asp

Mark Newman

http://www.marknewmansculpture.com/
http://marknewman.deviantart.com/