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29/10/2026

A stairway to the sky or an escape route?
At KIKK Festival in Belgium, French artist Jean-Pierre David, founder of the collective Aérosculpture, creates installations using helium, lightweight structures and movement. His floating sculptures seem to defy gravity, gently swaying and drifting as if they were living organisms suspended in the air.

The balloons move with subtle changes in the air, creating a hypnotic rhythm that invites visitors to slow down, look up and simply watch.

Since the mid-1990s, David has explored the possibilities of aerostatic sculpture, combining inflatable forms, light and engineering to create works that blur the boundaries between art, design and technology.

His practice asks us to reconsider something we rarely notice: the air around us. Invisible yet constantly moving, it becomes the force that gives these delicate sculptures life.


27/10/2026

A car has crashed into and demolished Howden’s historic Market Cross — a Grade II-listed monument whose stone base dates back to the medieval period.

The collision happened at around 10:38am on 22 October when a Range Rover mounted the paved area in Howden Market Place in East Yorkshire and struck the cross. One pedestrian was taken to hospital, but police said there were no reports of serious injuries.

Howden had a market by the late 13th century, and a medieval market cross once stood here. Although the original shaft and head were later lost, the medieval stepped base survived.

In 1909, a new five-metre-high shaft and ornamental cross were carved and installed on that ancient base. The complete monument was Grade II listed in 1952. Now centuries of history have been scattered across the Market Place.

The immediate priority is to secure the site and conserve whatever historic material can be salvaged. What happens next — restoration, reconstruction or replacement — remains to be decided.


26/10/2026

Brittani Locke, the artist behind The Soft Asylum, creates hand-marbled textiles, particularly silk scarves, using techniques with centuries of history.

This beautiful Fleur-de-Lis pattern may look perfectly controlled, but marbling is a constant negotiation between precision and unpredictability. Paint is floated across a viscous bath, then manipulated with combs and other tools to create the pattern. The silk is finally lowered onto the surface, capturing the design in a single transfer.

And that's what makes the process so fascinating: you can control the pattern, but never completely control the outcome.

Locke draws inspiration from traditional marbling practices including Japanese suminagashi and Turkish ebru, bringing these historic techniques into contemporary textile design.

Her work belongs to a much wider history of textile experimentation. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds more than 75,000 textile objects spanning over 5,000 years, while the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection in Lancashire cares for more than 30,000 objects from around the world.

Even closer to this particular technique, Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery has recently worked with marbling artist Ebru Kocak, who created marbled silk and viscose in response to its Fashion and Textiles Collection.

From historic manuscripts and fabrics to contemporary silk scarves, marbling continues to turn floating colour into something tactile, permanent and completely unique. Sometimes the most traditional patterns demand the steadiest hand.


25/10/2026

French artist Sam Dougados creates enormous drawings directly into the sand using nothing more than a rake. Known as "beach art," his practice sits somewhere between land art, environmental art and street art. At low tide, Dougados transforms huge areas of beach into intricate geometric and figurative compositions — sometimes hundreds of square metres in scale.

But there is a catch. The work is ephemeral by design. He has only a few hours before the incoming tide washes across the drawing and returns the beach to its original state. The ocean isn't destroying the artwork — the ocean is part of the artwork.

In 'Womanoïd', the process becomes an extraordinary physical performance. Dougados works intensely for around 3½ hours, moving across the beach and carving thousands of lines into the sand.

Born in Strasbourg in 1976 and now based in the south-west of France, Dougados is self-taught. He discovered beach art through a surf video in 2007 and began creating his own large-scale sand drawings in Biarritz the following year.

His work has since taken him around the world, from France and Spain to Morocco, Ireland, Bermuda, South Africa and beyond. And when the tide comes in, the artwork vanishes.

Dougados photographs his creations before they disappear, turning something destined to last for hours into a permanent image.

A drawing made by hand. A performance measured in time. And an artwork finished by the sea.


24/10/2026

There’s something hypnotic about watching a piece of pottery disappear beneath a layer of glaze. This beautifully calming process, shared by Johnny Wang and Culexa, shows a ceramic vessel being transformed with a soft pink glaze — the surface slowly changing while the form underneath remains intact.
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Glazing is one of the great acts of transformation in ceramics. What looks like a simple coating before firing can become something entirely different once heat has worked its way through the material: colour deepens, surfaces change and textures emerge.
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And this small studio moment connects to a much larger ceramic tradition. From the imperial porcelain collections of the Palace Museum in Beijing and the 國立故宮博物院 National Palace Museum in Taipei, to the extraordinary Chinese ceramics held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, glaze has been central to the history of ceramics — used not simply for decoration, but to create distinctive surfaces, colours and effects.
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The V&A's ceramics collection alone spans thousands of years of ceramic production and includes particularly significant collections from China, Japan and the Middle East.
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And then there are museums devoted almost entirely to the medium: the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the Raku Museum in Kyoto and the Musée Ariana in Geneva are just some of the places where the history and possibilities of ceramics can be explored.
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From ancient kilns to contemporary studios, the basic ingredients remain remarkably simple: clay, glaze, fire and time. And sometimes, watching that transformation happen is almost as satisfying as seeing the finished piece.


23/10/2026

More than 2,000 years before Monet filled rooms with water lilies, a Roman artist filled an underground dining room with an imaginary garden.

Created around 30–20 BC, the extraordinary frescoes from the Villa of Livia depict a lush garden unfolding across all four walls — pomegranates, quinces, palms, pines, flowers and birds, all rendered in delicate blues and greens.

But look closely and something strange becomes apparent.

The garden could never have existed exactly as painted.

Flowers bloom and fruit ripens simultaneously. Different plants from different seasons appear together, creating a perpetual garden that exists outside ordinary time. The trees seem to bend in the breeze, while birds move through the foliage, creating an almost immersive illusion of nature.

And there was a practical reason for the setting.

The original room was partially underground, making it a cool retreat during Rome’s hot summers. Instead of looking out onto a real garden, diners were surrounded by a painted one — an elaborate illusion that brought the outside world indoors.

The frescoes were discovered in 1863 at Livia’s villa near Prima Porta. Because of conservation concerns, they were detached from the walls in the early 1950s and eventually transferred to Palazzo Massimo, where the room was reconstructed in 1998.

Today, you can step inside that reconstructed space at Museo Nazionale Romano - Palazzo Massimo in Rome.

Two thousand years later, it still feels less like looking at a painting and more like stepping into another world.


22/10/2026

What does a city look like after it has been abandoned? Dutch artist Pim Palsgraaf creates strange, fragmented worlds from recovered wood, wallpaper, plywood and found materials — somewhere between sculpture, architecture, painting and the remains of a forgotten civilisation.

Born in Gouda in 1979, Palsgraaf graduated cm laude from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. His work often draws inspiration from neglected urban spaces and the forgotten edges of cities — places where buildings decay, nature takes over and the boundary between architecture and landscape begins to disappear.

His sculptural installations can feel like miniature dystopian cities. Dark structures emerge from walls and floors, sometimes appearing almost organic, as if the architecture itself is growing.

In 2016, Kunsthal Rotterdam presented his major site-specific installation 'In the Absence of Light', where his constructions invaded the museum space like a kind of architectural parasite.

His international exhibition history includes Fundación Valentín de Madariaga y Oya in Seville, Macadam Gallery in Brussels, VOLTA Basel, Art Rotterdam, ARCO Madrid, Museum Rijswijk and the Salangen Biennale in Norway.

He is currently represented by Galería Álvaro Alcázar in Madrid, with whom he has exhibited at several Spanish art fairs and exhibitions.

There is something fascinating about Palsgraaf’s ruins. They don't look like places that have simply been destroyed.

They look like places that are still becoming something else.


21/10/2026

Artist Shampoooty’s 'Kids Toys, Adult Issues' series takes the familiar visual language of childhood — colourful, playful, mass-produced toys — and turns it inside out.

Behind the bright colours and nostalgic forms are subjects that belong to the far more complicated world of adulthood: grief, addiction, mortality, anxiety, violence, loneliness and emotional struggle.

The contrast is what makes the work so unsettling.

We associate toys with innocence, imagination and safety. Shampoooty uses that same visual language to confront experiences that children are rarely prepared to understand, let alone process.

The sculptures can look playful at first glance, but the longer you look, the more the childhood reference begins to disappear. What remains is a confrontation with the realities that inevitably become part of growing up.

The series asks an uncomfortable question:
What if we could see the difficult truths of adulthood through the eyes of the children we once were?

'Kids Toys, Adult Issues' reminds us that beneath nostalgia is something much more complicated — the distance between what we imagined life would be and what we eventually discovered it to be.


20/10/2026

What happens when a sculpture starts behaving like a person? In 'Painted Happy', German artist Jakob Grosse-Ophoff turns movement into a strange little performance.

His playful kinetic sculptures combine mechanics, humour and everyday gestures, creating machines that seem to have personalities of their own. Rather than simply watching from a distance, visitors become part of the work, activating the sculptures and setting their movements in motion.

The result is somewhere between sculpture, theatre and a mechanical joke — familiar human actions transformed into something slightly absurd and unexpectedly poetic.

Born in 1991, Grosse-Ophoff works with movement, objects and mechanical systems to explore the relationship between humans and machines. His sculptures often feel as though they are caught halfway between functioning objects and living characters.

Now, 'Painted Happy' is part of his first museum solo exhibition, 'Jakob Grosse-Ophoff – Myself and Other Planets', at Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague.

📍 Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague
📅 31 October 2026 – 4 April 2027

A machine that moves like a human.

Or perhaps a human watching themselves in a machine.


19/10/2026

Chinese oil painter Xie Yifei creates enormous, densely packed cityscapes using a surprisingly simple tool: a small palette knife.

House by house, balcony by balcony, he builds sprawling urban landscapes from thick layers of textured oil paint. Water tanks, laundry lines, windows, rooftops and tiny architectural details fill the canvas, creating cities that feel both meticulously observed and almost impossible to enter.

Some paintings begin with a faint outline of the architecture. Others are painted directly onto the blank canvas, with Xie completing one building before moving on to the next.

The palette knife gives every surface its own texture, while the accumulation of thousands of individual marks creates an extraordinary sense of scale.

And there is an almost obsessive patience behind the process. One painting reportedly took him from winter into spring — a marathon of painting that he joked nearly broke his back.

Only when the city is finally complete does he put down the palette knife and pick up a fine brush to sign his name.

Step back and the individual strokes disappear. What remains is a vast, colourful cityscape that almost looks real enough to walk into.


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