Maria Roosen calls herself “an artist with green fingers”—fittingly, her sculptures and installations feature imagery that references both plant and human organs, often in conjunction. Though her practice incorporates wool, wood, and sometimes watercolor, Roosen is best known for her ability to manipulate hand-blown glass. She creates a playful irony in the contrast between the material’s hardness and the fluidity and voluptuousness of the shapes she creates with it.

Emu Flag
The reproductive organs of insects come in all different shapes and are actually quite beautiful. Some look like intricate flowers, others like exotic coral. Most look as though they belong to the biology of some distant planet. Maria Fernanda Cardoso has made her fascination with the natural sciences the basis of her art for many years, with the help of her husband and artistic collaborator Ross Harley.

“O impossivel”

They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.

Chozumaki

CHOZUMAKI by Nelo Akamatsu consists of a glass vessel filled with water. A small winged magnet rotating at the bottom of the vessel produces a vortex. The tiny bubbles cause curious sounds when they are swallowed into the vortex. Viewers will hear these sounds through a spiral pipe shaped like a cochlear duct. Countless vortices exist in the universe, including the enormous revolution of the galaxy and also the minimal spin of electrons. They all have a fractal structure that seems to be one of the fundamental elements of the universe. Water has another important role in this work. In numerous cultures is associated with purification. The sight and sound of the water vortex that is constantly changing shape will remind viewers of crossing the boundary between the physical world and the psychological world, and will extend their perception of vital organs.

Composition for Paper Shredders, Prepared Chord Organs, Fire-Bell, Hand Mixer and Cymbal
via highlike submit

Known Universe, Constellation: Zubiate/Pell
My principal strategies are, the transformation of common objects into other recognizable objects, extreme scale shifts, and the juxtaposition of disparate materials and images.I have converted items from the home into landscapes or sites of natural and industrial processes to show the interaction of nature, culture, and origins, and constructed models of internal organs from common materials to position these connections within the body.

Intromitent organs of Tasmanian harvestman models after electronic microscope scans

Museum of Copulatory Organs

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC