Cutting ornate lace patterns, spindly roots, and scaly chameleon skin with meticulous detail, Yorkshire-based artist Pippa Dyrlaga (previously) continues to turn single sheets of paper into elaborate works. Her process involves drawing a design that typically features a floral motif before slicing each component by hand with a scalpel. Once the excess paper is removed, the resulting works unveil intricate patches of wildflowers and painstakingly sliced fur and fins. Dyrlaga’s works will be included in an exhibition in Paris next month, and she’s in the midst of a collaborative project with origami artist Ankon Mitra. More

Every month, Colossal shares a selection of opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. If you’d like to list an opportunity here, please get in touch at hello@colossal.art. You can also join our monthly Opportunities Newsletter.   Professorship at the ArtCenter College of Design’s Graduate Art MFAFeatured The Graduate Art Department at the ArtCenter College of Design (Pasadena, CA) invites artists working in any medium to apply for the position of Assistant/Associate/Full Professor. More

Meet Bandoola, an Asian timber elephant the British Army enlisted in WWII. Purchased as a calf, the lumbering creature was shipped to a teak plantation where he was forced to drag and push logs across the landscape to construct bridges and other structures. Bandoola’s life, while fictionalized by London-based illustrator and author William Grill in his forthcoming children’s book, is based on the true story of Elephant Bill, a soldier who worked with the animals in forestry camps during the war. More

 In the music video for Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn’s new song “Ten Degrees of Strange,” director Lynn Tomlinson (previously) captures the endless transformations of human emotion through moving clay. The Baltimore-based animator uses her singular technique, which involves painting the pliable material onto a glass backdrop and photographing each frame, to create a stunning visual companion to the indie track about “trying to outrun anxiety, seeking joy and strength in landscape and movement.” Seamlessly shifting from wide aerial shots to underwater close-ups, the animation opens with an inscribed ancient tablet before following the antagonistic relationship between a central character and a dog. More

NEW YORK (AP) – The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will return to its pre-pandemic form this year, with its route restored through Manhattan, high-flying helium balloons once again pulled by handlers and crowds welcomed back to cheer them on. This year's parade - the 95th annual - will snap back ...

PHOENIX (AP) – Canadians Ian and Heather Stewart are savoring the idea of leaving behind this winter's subzero temperatures when the U.S. reopens its borders to nonessential land travel next week and they launch a long-delayed drive to their seasonal home in Fort Myers, Florida. Restrictions imposed by both countries ...

Andrew and Jane Daines started Chassie with the belief that furniture should be made locally and customers should have a connection to the people who make the goods. People used to know the butchers, tailors, cobblers, and craftspeople of their lives by name, but this connection has declined in recent years. To get what you want, you have to choose between something pre-fab, pricey, or a piece that will take forever to arrive. Jane and Andrew believe those are lousy choices. More

Alice Mann’s joyful portraits document South Africa’s drum majorettes, capturing the pride and performance of the young, all-female groups that practice this competitive sport.

Continually fascinated by the potential of the human figure, Mexico-based artist David Álvarez (previously) illustrates richly textured scenes with a dose of fantasy and surrealism: a bird’s perch transfixes a character who’s sprouted a branch nose, a man writhes on the ground as he grows from a gnarled stump, and a Cheshire cat lifts a blanket to unveil a moon hidden beneath. Underlying many of his works is “the expressive force and the gesture of the human body,” Álvarez tells Colossal, themes that are rendered through highlights and dense markings in graphite that add intrigue and mystery to the monochromatic depictions. More

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday that a federal no-fly list for violent or unruly airline passengers should be “on the table” as conflicts between staff and travelers on commercial airplanes soar. Asked if such passengers should be prevented from flying, Mr. Buttigieg said, “I think that should be on ...

Southwest Airlines has launched an internal investigation into an Associated Press reporter’s claim that a pilot said the anti-Biden slogan “Let’s go, Brandon” over the loudspeaker, spurring calls on the left for his firing. In a Sunday statement, the airline said that it “does not tolerate any behavior that encourages ...

ROME (AP) – Nearly five months after President Joe Biden declared “America is back” on his first presidential visit abroad, the president's challenge now that he's back in Europe is convincing the world that America is here to stay. Attending twin summits in Rome and then Scotland, Biden is asking ...

A lucent half-circle, “Hometown Moon” is nestled within the rugged topography of China’s Mount Tai. The glowing orb, which was designed by Syn Architects, radiates on a surrounding water feature, creating a dramatic, mirrored reflection that appears to make the cleaved design whole. With illuminated pillars to support the concrete chapel below, the construction mimics “a moon that never sets,” designers told Dezeen. “We returned to the birthplace of Confucianism, rebuilding the relationship between dualities such as city and the countryside.” Inside the venue, a mountain-like sculpture covered in moss sprawls throughout and ends at the bottom half of the massive design. More

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The island nation of Tonga on Friday reported its first-ever case of COVID-19 after a traveler from New Zealand tested positive. Tonga is among the few remaining nations in the world that have avoided outbreaks of the virus. Like many of its neighbors, Tonga's isolation ...

In Vorja Sánchez’s ghostly dreamworld, spectral creatures plunge from the sky with long, wispy appendages that grasp onto the landscape. The Barcelona-based artist and illustrator (previously) disrupts otherwise peaceful photos with the massive forms that haunt unsuspecting hikers and farm animals as they peek out from behind a hill or congregate in airborne groups. Prints of the playfully illustrated phantoms are available in Sánchez’s shop, and you can find more from the series on Instagram. More

 Regardless of its unabashed tech culture, San Francisco remains a hub for analog artforms, hosting an annual festival that uses a 7-ton steamroller to print linocuts and housing one of the last remaining publishers of its kind. Arion Press is dedicated to the age-old practice of bookmaking, and with a small team of type casters, proofreaders, printers, and binders, painstakingly produces artist publications entirely by hand. An episode of Raw Craft, a film series produced by The Balvenie distillery, visits the publisher with the late Anthony Bourdain as host. More

In a poetic new series of works on canvas, German-Pakistani artist Jasmin Siddiqui, aka Hera, nods to her background in street art with sweeping, spray-painted marks, chaotic drips and splatters, and snippets of text. The gestural pieces are rooted in narrative and feature wide-eyed characters who wear headdresses of long-nosed rats, wolves, and strange, hairless creatures. In each imaginative rendering, Hera positions the possibility and wonder of adolescence alongside wild animals often deemed nuisances to human society, with “I’m fine really” displayed next to a child whose finger is snapped in a mousetrap and the title of another work, “Love Her But Leave Her Wild,” accompanying a contorted figure. More

Diving into family lore during the pandemic, Kai Yokoyama meets his ancestors through photography, weaving together archival pictures from the past with his own hushed images of the present.

The designer team at the wildly popular Yearcalendar evokes the fresh start of a blank notebook with its oversized 2022-at-a-glance. Uniquely organized to display the months in long columns, the wall planner is complete with an A4 page’s ubiquitous blue and red rules and punched sides. This year’s calendar comes in two sizes, 50 x 70 and 70 x 100 centimeters, a Swedish and international format, and is only available for pre-order. More

DENVER (AP) — The United States has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation — a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female — and expects to be able to offer the option to nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people ...

Based in the coastal town of Shoreham-by-Sea, England, artist Louise Durham creates towering wooden sculptures of reclaimed sea defense timber and vibrant stained glass. She embeds stripes and circles in a full spectrum of color within the totem-style works, which when illuminated, cast kaleidoscopic shadows on their surroundings. “It is all about the light,” she says. “That’s the magic of glass and the magic of all living things.” In a note to Colossal, Durham explains that she utilizes traditional leaded light techniques, along with fusing and slumping—these involve connecting two pieces together and melting the material in a mold, respectively—to create bisected circles and asymmetric stripes. More

A campaign that began with ordinary people donating frequent-flyer miles has raised enough in two months to provide 40,000 flights for refugees from Afghanistan, and organizers and the White House are looking to nearly double that figure. About 3,200 flights with donated miles have already carried Afghans from temporary housing ...

Seoul-based artist Yeesookyung (previously) fuses Korean and Japanese craft traditions in her elegant, gilded sculptures. Blending ornately patterned vessels with deities and animals, the delicate assemblages meld shards of discarded ceramic into new forms with bulbous sides, halved figures, and drips of metallic epoxy. Utilizing fragments from previous works references the Korean tradition of discarding porcelain with small irregularities, while the visibly repaired crevices draw on Kintsugi techniques, the Japanese art of highlighting the beauty of broken vessels with thick, gold mendings. More

Salamander silhouettes, an ant clutching a snack, and the diverse findings of an unintentional insect trap are a few of the winners of the 2021 Close-Up Photographer of the Year contest (previously). Now in its third year, the global competition garnered more than 9,000 entries across 55 countries, an incredible selection that unveils the stunning and minuscule details of the natural world. See some of our favorite shots below, and view all winners on the contest’s site.  More

Two new site-specific pieces by Courtney Mattison (previously) position ceramic sculptures of corals, sponges, and anemones in a swirling cluster of ocean diversity. Titled “Revolve” and “Our Changing Seas VII,” the wall reliefs are the latest additions to the Los Angeles-based artist’s body of work, which advocates for ecological preservation by highlighting the beauty and fragile nature of marine invertebrates. In both installations, Mattison contrasts the vibrant, plump tentacles of healthy creatures with others sculpted in white porcelain to convey the devastating effects of the climate crisis, including widespread bleaching. More