Here Barbara Freitag examines all the literature on the subject since their discovery 160 years ago, highlighting the inconsistencies of the various interpretations in regard to origin, function and name. By considering the Sheela-na-gigs in their medieval social context, she suggests that they were folk deities with particular responsibility for assistance in childbirth.

This fascinating survey sheds new light on a controversial phenomenon, and also contains a complete catalogue of all known Sheela-na-gigs, including hitherto unrecorded or unpublished figures.

Here Barbara Freitag examines all the literature on the subject since their discovery 160 years ago, highlighting the inconsistencies of the various interpretations in regard to origin, function and name. By considering the Sheela-na-gigs in their medieval social context, she suggests that they were folk deities with particular responsibility for assistance in childbirth.

This fascinating survey sheds new light on a controversial phenomenon, and also contains a complete catalogue of all known Sheela-na-gigs, including hitherto unrecorded or unpublished figures.

This volume can rightfully be called "a film school in a single book." Investigating and analyzing the elements and concepts of motion picture creation, this book looks closely at 25 films that represent a wide range of styles and subjects. Although most motion picture viewers have seen numerous movies in their lifetime, few in the general public have a firm and deep understanding of how motion pictures are created, or a grasp of the intricacies of cinematic storytelling and content. By presenting 25 films, American and international, Hollywood and independent, this book educates and enlightens readers about the details of the motion picture creation process. Some readers will have viewed certain films in the volume, but many will be introduced to major cinematic works within the canon of great and essential films for the very first time. Topics explored include animation, period films, editing, directorial style, and non-linear cinematic structure. Readers will learn about the origin of the jump cut in Breathless, time and space in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the editing in Orson Welles's essay film F is for Fake. The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures: 25 Movies to Make You Film Literate will educate the novice and avid moviegoer alike about the inner workings of this dynamic, popular, and culturally significant art form.

South African beadwork has a rich and diverse history and is abundantly represented in the beaded art pieces in the Wits Art Museum (WAM) collection. Some works date back to the 4th century CE but most date from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Currently numbering over 9 000 items, the three major collecting areas of classical, historical and contemporary African artworks are broad in their geographical range and deep in some local areas of specialisation. Paying homage to this collection, Beadwork, art and the body is a compilation of essays by scholars who have researched and written about the traditions, practices and aesthetic forms of beadwork in southern Africa. The book covers an expansive history of beadwork in South Africa from the 19th century to the contemporary moment. The artists and the beadwork featured range from Sotho-, Tsonga-, Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers, ending with a focus on fashion designer Laduma Ngxokolo, whose work has been inspired by Xhosa beadwork. Questions of ethnic affiliation and beadwork patterns are explored in relation to the different aesthetic forms of beadwork and its use as a marker of identity and status within and beyond communities.

Godzilla & Kong: The Cinematic Storyboard Art of Richard Bennett features storyboard art from the blockbuster hits Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Kong: Skull Island. It features a selection of the best sequences from these three films, along with full color stills reflecting the final shots in the film. Special "Unused Scenes" sections give you an unprecedented peek into the making of the films, revealing never before seen sequences. Presented in a deluxe 11.75" x 8.5" widescreen hardcover coffee table book of over 200 pages, plus featuring an introduction by Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard and afterword by Oscar-Nominated Production Designer Stefan Dechant, this collection is a must for movie buffs, film students, and all Kaiju aficionados. "Within these pages we find the imagination and artistry of Richard Bennett. He brings to life the Kaiju of cinema's yesteryear through the modern retelling of Legendary Pictures' Monsterverse." -Stefan Dechant, Oscar-Nominated Production Designer "When I see Richard's boards, I see the film." -Adam Wingard, Director of Godzilla vs. Kong

Vertigo seeks to document the surge of multimedia art driven by the advent of new technologies, including works produced by great names in art such as Balla, Warhol, Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Nam June Paik, and Laurie Anderson.

Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films. The necktie murders in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy; Chicago’s Jazz Age crime of passion; the fatal hookup in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; the high school horrors committed by the costumed slasher in Scream. These and other cinematic crimes have become part of pop-culture history. And each found inspiration in true events that provided the raw material for our greatest blockbusters, indie art films, black comedies, Hollywood classics, and grindhouse horrors. So what’s the reality behind Psycho, Badlands, The Hills Have Eyes, A Place in the Sun, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Dirty Harry? How did such tabloid-ready killers as Bonnie and Clyde, body snatchers Burke and Hare, Texas sniper Charles Whitman Jr., nurse-slayer Richard Speck, and Leopold and Loeb exert their power on the public imagination and become the stuff of movie lore? In this collection of revelatory essays, true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes a fascinating trip down the crossroads of fact and fiction to reveal the sensational real-life stories that are more shocking, taboo, and fantastic than even the most imaginative screenwriter can dream up.

For Neophytes - to learn the fundamentals, and appreciate the main features of a model, its qualities and weaknesses. For amateurs - to create the desire to know more about fine watches. For connoisseurs - to revise important concepts and even increase their knowledge. This new edition includes new illustrations. What is a beautiful watch? How do you make a good choice? The Magic of Watches explains how and why these little objects are so precious, fascinating and exciting. The book presents paradoxes: why a one-million-dollar watch might be less precise and more fragile than one that costs 15 dollars. It comes back to the origins of the measurement of time: how did we go from the water clock to the wristwatch? The book goes on to technique: how does a mechanical movement work? How does a quartz one work?; delves into details: what is a 'complication' and when do we speak about 'chronometer'?; showcases art: how do we enamel a dial? The Magic of Watches is unique: it focuses in detail on the basics in order to understand and love watches better.

Issue 9 of of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari's accessible image-based artists' magazine that challenges the limits of the contemporary art economy Toilet Paper is an artists' magazine created and produced by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, born out of a passion or obsession they both cultivate: images. The magazine contains no text; each picture springs from an idea, often simple, and through a complex orchestration of people it becomes the materialization of the artists' mental outbursts. Since the first issue, in June 2010, Toilet Paper has created a world that displays ambiguous narratives and a troubling imagination. It combines the vernacular of commercial photography with twisted narrative tableaux and surrealistic imagery. The result is a publication that is itself a work of art which, through its accessible form as a magazine, and through its wide distribution, challenges the limits of the contemporary art economy.

The Handbook of Greek Sculpture aims to provide a detailed examination of current research and directions in the field. Bringing together an international cast of contributors from Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the volume incorporates new areas of research, such as the sculptures of Messene and Macedonia, sculpture in Roman Greece, and the contribution of Greek sculptors in Rome, as well as important aspects of Greek sculpture like techniques and patronage. The written sources (literary and epigraphical) are explored in dedicated chapters, as are function and iconography and the reception of Greek sculpture in modern Europe. Inspired by recent exhibitions on Lysippos and Praxiteles, the book also revisits the style and the personal contributions of the great masters.

In a fine assimilation of abstraction, myth, landscape and conceptualization, her art is threaded with the face, form and guration of the `goddess' in various incarnations of Rini's own design. This book is an attempt to understand and appreciate the dramatis persona, review her creative journey and take the reader through the various stages of her life and work until the present, with its focus on an exceptionally impressive and extensively varied repertoire.

Despite the profusion of knightly effigies created between c. 1240 and c. 1330 for tombs throughout the British Isles, these commemorative figures are relatively unknown to art historians and medievalists. Until now, their rich visual impact and significance has been relatively unexplored by scholars. In this study, Rachel Dressler examines this category of sculpture, illustrating how English military figures employ a visual language of pose, costume, and attributes to construct a masculine ideal that privileges fighting prowess, elite status, and sexual virility. Like military figures on the Continent, English effigies represent knights wearing chain mail and surcoats, and bearing shields and swords; unique to the British examples, however, is the display of an aggressive sword handling pose and dynamically crossed legs. Outwardly hyper masculine, the carved figures partake in artistic subterfuge: the lives of those memorialized did not always match proffered images, testifying to the changing function of the knight in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This study traces the development of English military figures, and analyzes in detail three fourteenth-century examples-those commemorating Robert I De Vere in Hatfield Broad Oak (Essex), Richard Gyvernay at Limington (Somerset), and Henry Allard in Winchelsea (Sussex). Similar in appearance, these three sculptures represent persons of distinctly different social levels: De Vere belonged to the highest aristocratic rank, where Gyvernay was a lesser county knight, and Allard was from a merchant family, raising questions about his knightly standing. Ultimately, Dressler's analysis of English knight effigies demonstrates that the masculine warrior during the late Middle Ages was frequently a constructed ideal rather than a lived experience.

The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.

From the 17th century, ajami decoration was prevalent in the interior adornment of the houses of Damascene merchants and notables. This study, done from the stylistic, historical - as well as the technical, points of view, has resulted in a unique and valuable document on the history of Damascus decoration.

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity, his radical performances are at odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey's career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey's performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work, the book places Athey's own writing at its centre, turning to memoir, memory recall and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances. In addition to documenting Athey's art, ephemera, notes and drawings, the volume features commissioned essays, concise 'object lessons' on individual objects in the Athey archive, and short testimonials by friends and collaborators including Dominic Johnson, Amber Musser, Julie Tolentino, Ming Ma, David Getsy, Alpesh Patel and Zackary Drucker, among others. Together they form Queer Communion, a counter history of contemporary art.

This work tells the story of the spectacular artistic and engineering project of carving the American presidents' portraits on Mount Rushmore. It describes how it was conceived and carried out. The author was brought up in sight of Mount Rushmore and witnessed the work in progress.

Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), created by Joan Skinner, is a somatic movement, dance and creative practice with a core underlying principle of releasing blocked energy, held tension and habitual patterns in body mind. It enables us to move with greater freedom and ease whilst awakening creativity and spontaneity. The 21 contributors to this book describe how SRT informs their own movement and/or dance practice and influences wider fields of practice including meditation, architecture, poetic listening, visual art, writing, technology and choreography. For them SRT is a transformative and lifelong practice that deepens connections with self, other, more than human life forms and with natural and urban landscapes. This is a book for anyone drawn to explore body mind, somatic, movement and dance practices, and for those who are exploring ways of living in the world creatively, empathically and with more ease and natural grace.

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL CHRISTOPHER BLAND PRIZE 2023*** 'I read the book in one go. I laughed and cried like a baby, and was transported back to a time of innocence, clouded by the enormity of the harsh reality . . . Just amazing' CATHERINE ZETA JONES 'As it happens, I was also a Jill in the eighties - but not half as good a Jill as real Jill' DAWN FRENCH 'Jill met the crisis head on . . . She held the hands of so many men. She lost them, and remembered them, and somehow kept going' RUSSELL T DAVIES A heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir of love, loss and cabaret through the AIDS crisis, from IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends - of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own - she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. In this moving memoir, IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder tells the true story of her and her friends' lives during the AIDS crisis -- juggling a busy West End career while campaigning for AIDS awareness and research, educating herself and caring for the sick. Most of all, she shines a light on those who were stigmatised and shamed, and remembers those brave and beautiful boys who were lost too soon. 'Thank God for people like [Jill] . . . I cannot recommend this book highly enough' MICHAEL BALL 'An engaging, moving account' TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW 'Simultaneously devastating and uplifting' GRAZIA 'Engrossing, heart-breaking and inspiring' MATT CAIN

A multidisciplinary overview of current research into the enduringly fascinating martial artefact which is the sword. The sword is the most iconic of all weapons. Throughout history, it has connected various, sometimes conflicting, dimensions of human culture: physical combat and representation of political power, definition of gender roles and refinement of body techniques, evolution of craftsmanship and mythological symbolism. The articles collected here explore these dimensions, from a variety of disciplines, among them archaeology, medieval history, museum conservation, and linguistics. They cover topics from the production and combat use of Bronze Age swords via medieval fencing culture to the employment of the sword in modern military. They question traditional sword typologies and wide-spread theories about sword making, discuss medieval sword terminology and the use of swords as royal insignia, and describe the scientific methods for approaching original finds. Arising from an international conference held at Deutsches Klingenmuseum Solingen (the German Blade Museum), the volume provides fresh insights into the forms the sword can take, and the thoughts it inspires. LISA DEUTSCHER and MIRJAM E. KAISER work in prehistoric archaeology, specialising in La Tène and Bronze Age swords, respectively. SIXT WETZLER is the deputy director of the German Blade Museum; his research focuses on the history of edged weapons, and their use. Contributors:Matthias Johannes Bauer, Holger Becker, Jan-Heinrich Bunnefeld, Rachel J. Crellin, Vincenzo D'Ercole, Andrea Dolfini, Raphael Hermann, Daniel Jaquet, Robert W. Jones, Ulrich Lehmann, Claus Lipka, Stefan Maeder, Michael Mattner, Florian Messner, Nicole Mölk, Ingo Petri, Stefan Roth, Fabrizio Savi, Ulrike Töchterle, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis, Marion Uckelmann, Henry Yallop

Enter the glamorous domain of world-famous jewellery house, Harry Winston, and discover the true rags-to-riches story of the immigrant family behind the phenomenon. Harry Winston’s famous slogan for his success was: “knowledge, courage, and the ability to finance.� King of Diamonds: The Flawless World of Harry Winston is the quintessential rags-to-riches success story of a very poor immigrant family emigrating from Ukraine to America. It is the story of how one man, Harry Winston, created a famous name with his company, founded in New York City in 1932. Winston became known for the owning and sales of very large diamonds. At one point, he owned a third of the world’s most famous gems, including the Hope Diamond, which earned him the moniker “King of Diamonds.� The book details how author Ronald Winston’s father got his start and began what would eventually become the most famous jewellery house in the world. Peek inside his first office, an upstairs Fifth Ave location, followed by subsequent locations in Rockefeller Centre, an office across from St. Patrick's Cathedral, and finally an image-building store on Fifth Avenue. Known as the “Jewelleer to the Stars,� Winston’s gems have appeared both on the Hollywood red carpet and in famous Hollywood films like Notorious starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Viola Davis, Helen Mirren, Gwyneth Paltrow, and many more have worn Winston pieces on Hollywood’s biggest nights. The story then follows Harry Winston’s successor and heir, Ronald Winston, and his making of the family name. Under Ronald, the company’s name would not remain just famous, but would become world-famous. Ronald built locations in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Japan, and China. Ronald’s saga continued with his entry into the revolution in Angola, buying diamonds from its charismatic leader, Jonas Savimbi. Ronald Winston risked his life in order to make profits that repaid the death taxes caused by his father’s passing. In all, King of Diamonds is a joyous evocation of two men who added an innumerable amount to the image, story, and marketing of luxury products, as well as to the joy of people who love and purchase these objects. After all, as frequent Winston jewellery-wearer Marilyn Monroe would say, “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.�

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face�—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

What to do with the fragments of a love affair? A postcard from a childhood sweetheart. A wedding dress in a jar. Barbed wire. Silicone breast implants. Red stilettos, never worn. These objects and many others make up the inspiring, whimsical, sometimes bizarre, and always unforgettable population of the real-life Museum of Broken Relationships. A decade ago, two lovers were struggling through their own painful breakup, desperate to heal their heartbreak without destroying the memory of the love they had shared. Then, an idea struck: they would create a communal space, a kind of refuge for - and cathartic celebration of - the everyday objects that had outlasted love. These items, along with the anonymous, intimate stories each piece represented, quickly captured hearts and imaginations across the globe. As word spread, the tiny museum became a worldwide sensation. Collected here are 203 of the best, funniest, most heartwarming and thought-provoking pieces that offer an irresistible experience of human connection. The Museum of Broken Relationships is a poignant celebration of modern love - and a must-read for anyone who has ever loved and lost.

Lois van Baarle is a freelance animator/illustrator from the Netherlands who graduated in 2009 from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht. Since then, her work has become very popular across the internet, with her Facebook followers closing in on one million and her Twitter account watched by over nineteen thousand eager eyes. The Art of Loish is her first "art of" book, and will examine her inspirations while showcasing some of her early work. Following this, the reader will learn how she developed her very distinctive style and discover advice as she discusses her working methods, offering tips on a variety of techniques that she utilizes in her art every day! The additional exclusive content of this book makes it a must-have for any lover of Loish's work!