Japanese designer Norihiko Terayama suspends simple floral arrangements in polygonal forms, contrasting the organic material with straight, meticulous lines. With the simple addition of pins and thread his series Crust of the Polygon reframes the dried plants as poetic sculptures. Another one of his series, Polygon of Tree Branch, features full branches encased in a similar geometric style. Terayama studied at Design Academy Eindhoven where he trained under designer Richard Hutten and was immersed in Dutch conceptual design. More

If you’ve ever wandered around Tokyo on foot you’ll know that it can sometimes be like a spider web of side streets and back alleys. It’s one of the things that makes Tokyo so unique and therein lies the allure of exploring the massive city. Now, one designer has brought that magic to bookshelves by designing back alley bookends. The clever idea is the brainchild of a Japanese designer who goes by the name monde. More

UK-based illustrator Richard Wilkinson created a series of fantastical insects based on the most famous Star Wars characters. It’s easy to imagine these incredibly life-like renderings truly existing as creatures crawling on a planet far away, and each is given a cheeky scientific name with Latin roots that relate to its sci-fi counterpart like Roboduobus Deoduobus for R2D2 or Chaetebarbatus Bonamicii for Chewbacca. Wilkinson has previous experience creating scientifically-minded illustrations for publications like New Scientist and Intelligent Life Magazine. More

Colorful orchids, identical in size, bloom in UK artist Laura Hart’s studio. From their bilateral symmetry to their splashes of pigment, the glass designer’s perfectly crafted forms illustrate the strange exotic beauty of the plant species. With their soft and fleshy glass petals, Hart’s botanical sculptures appear as fully bloomed flower heads, each of which has a different pattern to reflect the diversity of the species. “My fascination with orchids spans decades and at one point I had nearly seventy in my conservatory,” Hart tells Colossal. More

A record-breaking LEGO tree has taken shape at LEGOLAND Japan, a theme park in Nagoya dedicated to the beloved plastic bricks. The cherry tree’s construction marks the theme park’s first anniversary, and has been registered as the “largest LEGO brick cherry blossom tree” in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was made with 881,470 bricks which took over 6,500 hours to assemble. Superlatives aside, the hand-built tree is a spectacular sight to behold. More

From the outside, artist Mark deJong’s contemporary installation, Swing House, doesn’t particularly stand out from the other residences lining the street of Cincinnati’s Camp Washington neighborhood. The blue 19th-century building is narrowly built, and features charming architectural details that cap its windows and roof. The interior however, is remarkably different. All three levels of the home have been completely gutted to create an open floor plan void of any interior walls or floors, with a single swing positioned at the center of the space. More

We’ve been busy stocking The Colossal Shop with interesting finds from around the world, including handmade sailing ship kites, colorful small-batch soaps made in Maine, mid-century bird glassware, and a totally bonkers puzzle that changes colors as you put it together. See what’s new in The Colossal Shop! More

British graffiti artist Pref explores words and common phrases through unique multi-layered murals. His 3D text is used to create amalgamations of quippy sayings, often placing one word inside of another to give a piece multiple perspectives. In the work below a turquoise “more” subtly shifts into a salmon “less” simply by a twist of the viewer’s head. Since he got his start nearly two decades ago, Pref has been interested in challenging graffiti’s aesthetic, working with typography to bring a more accessible appearance to painted text. More

New work from Lisa Ericson (previously) continues the Portland-based artist’s hyperrealistic compositions of animals. Set on deep black backgrounds, her paintings showcase unusual combinations of peacefully co-existing fauna. Pelicans support rabbits, snakes, and ocelots, while tree frogs and songbirds find homes on the shells of turtles. Her most recent paintings are on view through May 25 at Antler Gallery in Portland, in a show titled Invisible Promise, alongside work from Scottish artist Lindsey Carr. More

Continuously secretive and unexpected when it comes to revealing his projects, Pejac (previously) once again surprised the art world by announcing an upcoming self-produced pop-up solo exhibition in Paris. Roughly a year since his last showing at an old gondola workshop on the canals of Venice, and a month since his surprise visit to NYC, the Spanish artist just announced this new show titled Waterline. More

During a residency this spring at La Maison Verte, a house affiliated Jardin Botanique in Marnay-sur-Seine, France, artist Jenine Shereos (previously) created a series of ephemeral installations using local flowers. Inspired by her long daily walks in the village and gardens, the Boston-based artist tells Colossal, “I was keenly aware of the continual shift of the different blooms of flowers all around me. In the beautiful old house where I stayed, there was a small room adjacent to my bedroom that felt like a kind of liminal in-between space, or a dream space. More

 The Yiwu International Trade Market in China is the world’s largest wholesale market, stretching nearly five miles and containing over 75,000 individual vendors. Chinese-American film director Jessica Kingdon peeks into the daily lives of the market’s workers in her observational documentary Commodity City, exploring the subtle interactions that occur amongst hoards of dolls, flowers, neon signs, clocks, and other consumer goods. The work is filmed in long, static shots, mirroring the days each vendor spends inside the consumer metropolis.  More

For a recent commission from indie record label Albert’s Favourites, London-based designer Tim Easley created an intricate circuit board completely out of plasticine clay. The finished work measures approximately 20 inches square (50 x 50 cm) and took the artist about 80 hours to complete. He then photographed the clay circuitboard with birds-eye and angled aerial views to create the final album artwork. Easley created the project for the London-based electronic music duo Modified Man. More

Explore, play, and wonder at gigantic, fantastical, artworks at Inflatable — a new exhibition at the Exploratorium. Born out of thin air, these dynamic sculptures include otherworldly organisms, a “forest” of cushiony columns, an inflatable “insect-eye” room, and more. Curated by Christopher Jobson, founder and editor-in-chief of Colossal, Inflatable features artwork by, Amanda Parer, Jason Hackenwerth, Jimmy Kuehnle, Shih Chieh Huang, and Pneuhaus. Entry to Inflatable is included with museum admission. More

It was 2002 when an international group of street art and electronic music enthusiasts organized the first Nuart Festival in Norway’s oil capital, Stavanger. The idea was to create a secondary event for their music program in order to introduce some of the most interesting artists of the underground street art movement. Keeping their concept simple yet original, the festival presented an annual platform for national and international artists who operated outside of the traditional art establishment, both indoors and outdoors, to stimulate conversation that would challenge the notions of what art is, and what it can be. More

Self-taught Gabonese photographer Yannis Davy Guibinga is known for portraits that highlight the diversity of cultures and identities in the African diaspora. His works are often richly hued, with subjects positioned against bright gradient backgrounds or adorned in warm tones. In his project The Darkest Colour however, Guibinga moves away from his multi-colored photo shoots to focus entirely on the color black and its relationship to darkness, mourning, and death. The series is set in front of a matte black background and features two nude models whose skin has also been painted black. More

In this meta animation, animator and director Ainslie Henderson (previously) seamlessly transforms a demonstration of his stop motion practice into a film where his miniature puppets take over. The rag tag group of figures break off from Henderson’s narrative to form a slapdash electronic band, utilizing scraps from his workbench to construct instruments from the same electric detritus used to form their own hands, faces, and feet. “Puppet making often begins by just gathering stuff, like materials that I find attractive like wood, sticks, wire, leaves, flowers, petals, and bits of broken electronics,” says Henderson in the film. More

Italian artist Manuel de Rita a.k.a. Peeta (previously) transforms static structures by painting colorful cubes and abstracted cylindrical shapes to appear as if they are floating above the surface of the wall. This technique was derived from the traditional 3D lettering he grew up painting, and continues to evolve as he experiments with realistic objects, like the window that protrudes from the turquoise and purple work below. “Initially, my works only realized the sculptural quality of individual letters, namely the ones that spelled out my own moniker Peeta,” he says in an artist statement. More

Toronto-based sculptor Gosia (previously) constructs minimally-hued porcelain busts of contemplative female forms from a variety of materials, including ceramic, polymer gypsum, resin, and most recently, porcelain. Her very first experiment with the new medium is included in her current solo exhibition, Beneath the Surface, at Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia. The work is an imperfect cast, a mistake which Gosia details in the text below. “Imperfect is one of those ‘happy accident’ pieces,” she explains. More

Architects Nathanael Dorent and Lily Jencks recently collaborated to build a sleek, modern home within the existing ruins of an 18th-century farmhouse. The home is built on a hill that overlooks more than 50 miles of Scotland’s pastoral fields and combines elements of both the old and new world. The structure features white, futuristic walls that wind throughout the length of its interior, which is completely powered by exterior solar panels. Although there are some updated elements, the structure still sits within the original stones of the farmhouse, and is topped by a pitched roof similar to the one that would have sheltered the old Scottish house. More