Scrap Wood Whittling is a must-have guide for any woodcarver looking to achieve something small, charming, and easy! Small wood carvings tend to intimidate, but author and master carver Steve Tomashek makes it approachable for anyone, even beginners. Opening with helpful insight on materials, tools, cuts, and safety, you'll then go on to complete your tiny animal carvings that slowly progress in difficulty. From a leaping pig and a standing sheep to an aquarium and cat diorama, each project contains clear, step-by-step instructions, coordinating photography, full-size patterns, tips on technique, painting, display ideas, and more!

Drawing especially on the encounters and relationships that defined her exceptional career, The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda outlines a sustainable legacy for the celebrated director and visual artist. Over nine chapters, it unpacks how creation, connection, and environment form the core of Varda’s artistry, which centers foremost on relationships with her family, with other artists, even with passersby she would meet in her travels around the world. Also celebrating her feminist legacy, the chapters cover a wide range, from the classic Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) to documentaries The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (2017) as well as selected art installations. The book’s final section is dedicated to teaching Varda’s work; here, ten scholars from around the world consider how Varda’s art and feminist pedagogies offer unique ways to bring crucial concepts into the classroom. By seeking a sustainable praxis to discuss and teach Varda’s work, and by making pedagogical concerns an explicit part of this approach, this book argues that Varda’s insights about the nature of creative work will inspire new generations of viewers and audiences.

'You will have a moment of quiet delight and a mood of introspection to carry you away.' Edmund de Waal Prized by collectors from East to West, Japanese netsuke are tiny objects of wonder that originated as utilitarian accessories for traditional Japanese dress. Over the centuries these small carved toggles, designed to hook over the top of the kimono sash, evolved into high-fashion depictions of all aspects of Japanese life. In this richly illustrated and highly accessible book, Julia Hutt draws on the V&A's world-famous netsuke collection to explore the origins and techniques of this captivating art form.

Haegue Yang is renowned for her multifaceted works that vary in form from collage to kinetic sculpture, perceptively evoking historical and contemporary narratives of migration, displacement, and cross-cultural translation. Using a language of abstraction, Yang transforms ordinary and domestic materials, such as venetian blinds, light bulbs, drying racks, yarn, and bells, into deeply allegorical, meticulously constructed installations and sculptures that dissociate these materials from their original contexts. The artist's installations become immersive environments that provoke the senses with a diversity of scents, sounds, and textures. Featuring essays contextualising Yang's artistic career, this book fully illustrates the scope of Art Gallery of Ontario's groundbreaking exhibition and generates new understandings of Yang's transformative contributions to the field of contemporary art.

If you have ever wanted to try your hand at chip carving and are looking for an approachable introduction, Chip Carving Starter Guide is the perfect place to begin! Its opening chapters will help you build a solid foundation of knowledge on the basics of chip carving, transferring patterns, applying finishes, and correctly making a variety of chips. You'll then go on to complete more than 22 activities and projects to practice carving with confidence as you start simple and slowly progress to advance your skills! Featuring clear step-by-step instructions, coordinating photography, complete materials and tools lists, full-size patterns, and expert tips, this must-have guide emphasizes the importance of skill-building and developing your techniques correctly and carefully to ensure success!

How does photography shape the way we see sculpture? In "David Smith in Two Dimensions," Sarah Hamill broaches this question through an in-depth consideration of the photography of American sculptor David Smith (1906-1965). Smith was a modernist known for radically shifting the terms of sculpture, a medium traditionally defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to use industrial welding as a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, influencing a generation of minimalists to come. What is less known about Smith is his use of the camera to document his own sculptures as well as everyday objects, spaces, and bodies. His photographs of sculptures were published in countless exhibition catalogs, journals, and newspapers, often as anonymous illustrations. Far from being neutral images, these photographs direct a pictorial encounter with spatial form and structure the public display of his work.
"David Smith in Two Dimensions" looks at the sculptor's adoption of unconventional backdrops, alternative vantage points, and unusual lighting effects and exposures to show how he used photography to dramatize and distance objects. This comprehensive and penetrating account also introduces Smith's expansive archive of copy prints, slides, and negatives, many of which are seen here for the first time. Hamill proposes a new understanding of Smith's sculpture through photography, exploring issues that are in turn vital to discourses of modern sculpture, sculptural aesthetics, and postwar art. In Smith's photography, we see an artist moving fluidly between media to define what a sculptural object was and how it would be encountered publicly.

This book restores the fountains of Roman Byzantium, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul, reviving the sounds, shapes, smells and sights of past water cultures. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, is surrounded on three sides by sea, and has no major river to deliver clean, potable water. However, the cultures that thrived in this remarkable waterscape through millennia have developed and sustained diverse water cultures and a water delivery system that has supported countless fountains, some of which survive today. Scholars address the delivery system that conveyed and stored water, and the fountains, large and small, from which it gushed. Papers consider spring water, rainwater and seawater; water suitable for drinking, bathing and baptism; and fountains real, imagined and symbolic. Experts in the history of art and culture, archaeology and theology, and poetry and prose, offer reflections on water and fountains across two millennia in one location.

The work of the artist couple Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) resists categorization. It is a hybrid of art, urban planning, architecture, and engineering, but above all an aesthetic uniquely their own: surreal and ethereal environmental interventions that have graced monuments, public parks, and centers of power alike. This compact book spans the complete career of the couple who were born on the very same day, met in Paris, fell in love, and became a creative team like no other. With rich illustration, it spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude's earliest projects in the 1950s right through to The Floating Piers, installed at Lake Iseo, Italy, in 2016. The book celebrates all of the couple's most famous environmental interventions, such as The Gates in New York's Central Park and the Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, while also featuring early drawings and family photos unknown to the wider public. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Netsuke - classic belt decorations for men - are rooted in a historical, mythological and artistic tradition in Japanese culture. Woodcarvers and their pupils, even counterfeiters, continued the work of their role models, in copies or variants of what came before them, and even created major works of art with the smallest of dimensions. Since the opening up of Japan in 1853, the miniature works have gained appreciation, and enthusiasts are found all over the world. Today netsuke are still being created in a great variety of motifs. Netsuke in Comparison presents one hundred netsuke from a private collection. For the very first time, it endeavours to juxtapose them with comparative images from collections and literature in order to locate them within this genre and to convey something of their diversity and expressiveness. Text in English and German.

This book restores the fountains of Roman Byzantium, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul, reviving the sounds, shapes, smells and sights of past water cultures. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, is surrounded on three sides by sea, and has no major river to deliver clean, potable water. However, the cultures that thrived in this remarkable waterscape through millennia have developed and sustained diverse water cultures and a water delivery system that has supported countless fountains, some of which survive today. Scholars address the delivery system that conveyed and stored water, and the fountains, large and small, from which it gushed. Papers consider spring water, rainwater and seawater; water suitable for drinking, bathing and baptism; and fountains real, imagined and symbolic. Experts in the history of art and culture, archaeology and theology, and poetry and prose, offer reflections on water and fountains across two millennia in one location.

Concrete is in. And no wonder: it's inexpensive, durable, and makes unique, stunning pieces with which to decorate your home. With just a bag of ready-mixed concrete, water and a few utensils and moulds you can find around the house, you can create beautiful, minimalist items in no time at all; from clocks, vases, lampshades and bowls through to jewellery, wine coolers and desk organisers. Each project is equipped with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and tips, and all can be made with very little know-how - making it a perfect craft for beginner concrete artisans, as well as the more experienced mason. A perfect mix of power, presence and practicality, bring concrete into your home today and discover a new-found love for this often overlooked but remarkable building material.

Chinese Buddhist wooden sculptures of Water-moon Guanyin, a Bodhisattva sitting in a leisurely reclining pose on a rocky throne, are housed in Western collections and are thus removed from their original context(s). Not only are most of them of unknown origin, but also do lack a precise date. Tracing their sources is moreover difficult because of the scant information provided by art dealers in previous periods. Thus, only preliminary investigations into their stylistic development and technical features have been made so far. Moreover, until recently none of the Chinese temples that provided their original context, i.e. their precise/exact/specific position within those temple compounds and their respective place in the Buddhist pantheon, have been examined at all. In her study, Petra H Roesch investigates these very aspects, including questions about the religious position and function of the sculptures of this special Bodhisattva. She also looks at the technical construction, the collecting of Chinese Buddhist sculptures in general and those sculptures made of wood in particular. She uses a combination of stylistic, iconographical, buddhological, as well as technical methodologies in her investigation of the Water-moon Guanyin images and sheds light on the Buddhist temples in Shanxi Province, the works of art they once housed, and the religious practices of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries connected with them.

Rachel Whiteread has single-handedly expanded the parameters of contemporary sculpture with her casts of the outer and inner spaces of familiar objects, sometimes in quiet monochrome, sometimes in vivid jewel-like colour. She won the Turner Prize in 1993, the same year as her first large-scale public project, House, a concrete cast of a nineteenth-century terraced house in London's east end. This book, by writer and editor Charlotte Mullins - the first significant survey to examine Whiteread's career to date - has been substantial updated with a new chapter containing 10 major works, including Tate's Turbine Hall installation Embankment and Cabin, Whiteread's first permanent public sculpture in America. Born in London in 1963, Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists. Her work is characterised by its use of industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal. With these she casts the surfaces and volume in and around everyday objects and architectural space, creating evocative sculptures that range from the intimate to the monumental.

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity. Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

Pierre Culot (1938-2011) was a Belgian ceramist and sculptor who was trained by Antoine de Vinck and English master potter Bernard Leach. He is one of the ceramists of the 1950s who transformed their craft into an art form. In his work, Pierre Culot passionately expresses his desire to be in the world, to be on earth and to be in nature the sole generator of life and beauty. The clay that he molds into slabs, scratches and enamels becomes containers for daily use with majestic presence. Over his career Culot aimed at mastery of his practice, shaping his pieces in terms of size and in surface effect, by combining the raw earth in each item with luxuriant enamels that had unique variations.   All of Culot’s life he remained faithful to his initial experience as a potter, evolving his ceramic works from basic forms (bowls, plates, jugs) to more daring shapes (cruciform vases, gourds, compound pots, inkwells), and even into the landscape space by sculpting garden walls. This book offers a complete overview of his unique and multi-faceted career in pottery, sculpture and landscaping.   Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.
Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protege of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate into her artistic model of race not only racial science but also popular ideas that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

This book was written for people who have never used a 3D carving machine. It teaches the basics of designing and making things with Inventables' software (Easel) and 3D carving machines (X-Carve and Carvey). We'll take you step-by-step through five projects you can build yourself as a beginner: an inspiration tile, kitchen cutting board, custom block stamp, fidget spinner, and balsa wood glider. The book also features aspirational projects from makers in the community, like an electric guitar, to show what is possible through 3D carving. The design files and instructions for projects - ranging from beginner to expert - can be found on the Inventables website.

This book presents the first full length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Starting with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages and to the re-evaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.

The Hanau City Map project by Claus Bury relates to the new city of Hanau, which was formed from 1597 on and is characterised by its strictly geometric pattern of streets and star-shaped ramparts. The walk-on granite sculpture on the square directly next to the Walloon-Dutch church references the city map engraved in copper in 1632 by Matthaus Merian and revitalises Hanau's historical 17th century topography through its relief-like recesses and encompassing seating areas. An installation spanning centuries that brings the history, present, and future into a flourishing dialogue for the visitors of Hanau. Text in English and German.

This study provides an in-depth examination of the art and meaning of the ivory-carved Cloisters Cross. Created in a 12-century English workshop, the Cross is widely recognized as a masterpiece of English Romanesque art. This book seeks to provide information on questions of its origins and stylistic connections, its complex iconographical programme and its inscriptions. The authors seek to give a new perspective to the cultural and intellectual background against which artistic patronage in England was exercised and the theological and liturgical considerations which influenced the execution of the Cross. The book also aims to make a significant contribution to the literature on medieval history.