Galicia, Spain-based artist Abi Castillo continues to create iterative self-portraits through her evolving ensemble of ceramic personas. Her delicate yet emotive figures are an invitation to consider the inner self, transformation, and the beauty of the natural world.

Femininity, nature, and symbolism play a central role within Castillo’s sculptures, contrasting with the notion of concealment. “This ambivalence between mysticism and drama, between monstrosity and beauty, is all very present,” she explains in an artist statement.

Though each ceramic character is distinct, her body of work carries overarching formal motifs including colorful hairstyles and wide eyes with light blue irises. Organic elements—such as flowers, insects, coral, and marine foliage—wrap themselves around Castillo’s figures, evoking a sense of protection through delicate armor.

Last time we checked in with Castillo, she mentioned plans to move into a larger studio, where she works now. The artist shares that this opportunity has given her larger creative freedom, and she is looking forward to an exciting year including a group exhibition with Beautiful Bizarre Magazine opening next week at Outré Gallery in Melbourne. For updates and studio views, find Castillo on Instagram.

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Chiseled from wood, Aleph Geddis’ spindly, playful, vaguely alien wooden sculptures evoke an enigmatic tension between identity and glyph. His organic, hand-worked objects teeter between abstraction and figuration like retrofuturistic icons. The artist lives between Japan, Bali, and Orcas Island in Washington. “This split has been incredibly generative, allowing me to carry my practice with me and respond to very different environments and energies,” he tells Colossal.

Scale is a constant source of fascination. Geddis has recently been working on a series he calls Littles, which are “inspired by the way children disappear into dreamy, imaginative worlds while playing with toys,” he says. “They feel personal and secretive, almost like talismans.”

On the larger side, Geddis is lately considering how pieces may transform into site-specific responses to environments. He’s also currently working on a large-scale project for the Burning Man festival amid Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which people will be able to walk through. “I love the idea of these forms existing in the clean, open environment of the playa, where they can be experienced at a completely different scale and in relation to the vast desert landscape.”

Some of Geddis’ works are currently on view at Crow Valley Gallery on Orcas Island alongside the work of his aunt, Kate Geddis. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Misato Sano’s studio is replete with piles of wooden offcuts, heavy lumber, woodworking equipment, and flowing natural light. The Miyagi-based artist has been sculpting charismatic dogs for several years, steadily adding more distinct characters to her growing pack.

Self-portraiture remains a consistent theme within Sano’s practice. Each dog evokes a different emotion mirroring the artist’s personality, ranging from shy and skittish to excited and silly. “Visualizing my inner self through expressions and gestures full of charm and humor has also become an opportunity to deepen my self-love,” she shares.

Sano’s distinctive woodcarving techniques are exemplary of the artist’s signature style. Dimpled surfaces, for instance, evoke different types of dog coats and allow for color variance to come through upon the finishing application of oil paint. Working with camphor wood, the sculptural exaggeration of physical features such as limbs, bulbous tufts of fur, and even nails add to the body of work’s playful appeal.

These rhythmic textures and amusing design choices have also lent themselves to explorations of embroidery and illustration. Meditative stitches and repetitive, gridded ink drawings are a continuation of the artist’s dialogue with herself.

Sano is gearing up for an exciting year. Later this month, her work will be on view in a duo exhibition at the Kan Hai Art Museum in Taiwan. In August, the artist’s work is traveling to the states for Nucleus Portland’s 10th anniversary show, before a third exhibition at Igoone Arai in her native Miyagi, Japan. Keep up with the artist’s tail-wagging adventures by following her on Instagram.

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When we visit major hubs like Copenhagen or Paris, we often take a lot of photos and make sure to grab a little souvenir as a memento of our visit. How better to remember the architecture and the feel of the city? Well, fiber designer Jake Henzler, a.k.a. Boy Knits World, figures you can stitch those memories into something much cozier than a postcard or a keychain.

Forthcoming from David & Charles Publishing, Henzler’s book Knit the City highlights buildings around the world through a series of building block-like patterns. Using a modular system, details like gables and windows can be switched up to create your own unique facades. Then it’s up to you to choose the colors you’d like to use. The blocks can then be stitched together to create a blanket, pillow covers, or any other application you can come up with.

Knit the City is slated for release on May 5. Pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop. You can also find Henzler’s patterns on Ravelry.

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From factories and barrel-roofed buildings to gabled churches and towers, Charles Young’s sprawling yet diminutive city of paper models continues to grow. Known for his miniature constructions and animations that often double as three-dimensional color studies, the sculptor and animator highlights a wide range of architectural styles with an emphasis on color pairings.

Since 2020, Young has been making hundreds of miniature structures inspired by A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Japanese costume designer and painter Sanzo Wada (1883-1967). (There’s even a fun, interactive website based on the book.) So far, Young has completed 258 buildings from the first volume, which focuses on two-color combinations, and there are 90 to go. But he’s created a wide array of examples featuring multiple color combinations, too.

In June, Young will display 120 three-color paper sculptures at Galerie Handwerk in Munich. And in addition to the paper models, he also creates architecturally inspired sculptures from wood and woven cane, some of which are currently on display in Scotland at Kirkcudbright Galleries and MacLaurin Gallery. See more on Young’s Instagram and Tumblr.

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For the 13th edition of Design Shanghai, Hu Yuehua presented a bold bouquet intersecting organic forms and human craft traditions. “Weaving Nature” is a large-scale composition of indigo and ochre leaves, blooms, and growths stitched together from dyed cotton and linen. Tightly nested in a wall-like garden, the individual pieces form a dense field of color and texture. Loose threads, raw edges, and tight rows of pleats radiate across the upright piece, merging evidence of the artist’s hand with the natural forms she depicts.

Design Shanghai concluded last week, but you can see more of the projects on display at the annual event on its website.

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As speculation about humans colonizing the moon and Mars ramps up, it’s increasingly likely that we’ll see attempts at living in places previously unthinkable. For Henry Wood, the potential for inhabiting Mars, in particular, has inspired a series of wooden figures with quite a turbulent backstory.

“The premise of this growing body of work is that in the not-too-distant future, humanity will establish a doomed colony on Mars,” he tells Colossal. Each figure has a specific history, their difficulties and demise carved into wood. The character he refers to as Scott, for example, found himself stranded at the South Pole, while an onslaught of ice from the sea buried Franklin. The title of the series fits this ill-fated adventure, too: We went to Mars and it was a disaster.

The idea for the collection began about a decade ago when the artist visited a Cairo museum and witnessed how conservators had reconfigured broken objects. “I am in awe of relics from Antiquity and wanted to imagine what it would be like in the distant future doing archaeology on other planets long after we had terraformed them,” he says. “I imagine them as statues or artifacts depicting great figures from Antiquity, resurrected from the ground and reconstructed to piece together the story of what went wrong on the Red planet.”

Each long-limbed adventurer takes several weeks to complete, with most of the pieces meticulously planned. Wood shares that sketchbooks are essential in mapping out his projects, and so is travel itself—although the artist doesn’t venture as far as his explorers. “I am visually interested in people, particularly in what their clothes say about them and their beliefs and values,” he says.

Wood prefers to gather materials as he travels or encounters objects that have a story. “I am always shipping bits of wood back to the workshop from wherever I am in the world,” he adds. Recent trips to the Pacific Northwest and Oaxaca allowed him to incorporate new tools and traditions, too. These emerge in the ways he often highlights the texture and grain of the wood and juxtaposes various techniques. “I love the contrast of tight acute angles alongside organic tears, splits, and fibers,” he adds.

Follow the artist’s process and keep an eye out for the latest adventurer to be added to the ranks on Instagram.

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If it weren’t for being so lightweight and crisp in their facets, Goran Konjevod’s elegant vases could at first glance be mistaken for thin porcelain. Crafted instead from precisely folded paper, the works tap into the relationship between—and associations with—material, form, and function. His meticulous origami compositions combine organic forms with nuanced hues and gradients, creating a sense of visual heft and presence from thin, gauzy material.

Konjevod’s work was recently included in Art of the Fold at ACCI Gallery, and “Grey Curves Vase” and “Artist’s Palette Vase” will be part of an exhibition titled The Craft of Paper: Contemporary Takes on Tradition this August at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta. See more on Instagram.

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Around a decade ago, Shinsuke Inoue sourced a piece of Japanese wood and carved a depiction of his child, “wanting to preserve their likeness in three dimensions,” the artist tells Colossal. The affectionate expression of a loved one in sculptural form spurred a new passion for woodcarving, specifically with an emphasis on the human figure.

Inoue’s pieces possess a kind of elemental groundedness or gravity that makes their restrained, sometimes hard-to-read expressions remarkably alluring. The figures often look straight ahead, and at the right angle, they make powerful eye contact with the viewer. And not unlike the way a small, meaningful smile or tiny frown can emerge from the most minute twitch of facial muscles, the striking characters are physically diminutive, but their inner emotional worlds are infinite.

Inoue works intuitively, allowing the material’s natural qualities to guide his hand. “I have virtually no idea what the finished piece will look like until I actually begin working with the wood,” he says. “As a result, the form often emerges as I carve, and I frequently change my plans midway through the process. Naturally, I keep the many failures a secret.” He always carves using hand tools and rarely titles the pieces.

The artist also references people he’s close to, along with strangers he passes on the street or sees photographs of, but his sculptures aren’t realistic depictions of specific individuals. Instead, Inoue concentrates on capturing a kind of universal expression of “the very essence of human existence… I hope that the inherent appeal of the wood, combined with its form and color, resonates to convey the essence of humanity itself.”

See more on Instagram.

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A fashionable bat, a melancholy sun, and a springtime spirit with seasonal allergies are just a few of the characters conceived by Cat Johnston. Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the Hastings-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms.

Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston’s otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children’s book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream. Recent characters comprise a series of gods representing sunburn, hay fever, and insomnia, which also—rather inconveniently—are the sun, flowers, and the moon.

Johnston recently made her first short film in collaboration with animator Joseph Wallace called “The Wickywock and the Jubjub Berry.” As a mythical woodland creature deals with a bout of sleeplessness, a forest sprite appears with what seems like a practical solution, but things don’t exactly go as planned.

Coinciding with a local pagan festival called the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, which occurs every first weekend of May, Johnston will have a small solo exhibition at a local pub called The Crown. In addition to signing on to work with London-based cinematic studio Passion Pictures as a director, the artist continues to explore the possibilities of film.

Johnston is currently working on a few ideas for animated series and hoping to develop a slightly longer format stop-motion project while also working on another short film, “which will be a mix of live action puppetry and stop-motion animation and will feature two flowery monsters and an extremely cute bee,” she says.

You might also enjoy the quirky Hieronymus Bosch-inspired figures of Roberto Benavidez.

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