Old furniture, lamp parts and other cast-away ephemera from domestic life transform into finely crafted architectural models in the hands of artist and designer Ted Lott, who uses a bandsaw as a tiny sawmill to produce the pieces.

In a new collection of work, Lott explores the hidden lives of domestic objects like suitcases, train cases, trunks and furniture, inserting timber frame structures just as thoughtfully assembled as the real thing. Lights installed inside each one impart a sense of habitation and illuminate all of those beautiful details.

Previously, we covered Lott’s “Habitation Series,” in which vintage chairs, stools and tables are taken over by the framework of parasitic miniature architecture. The structures almost seem to have grown organically according to the proportions of the original furniture, like fungus, each one entirely unique.

In his artist statement, Lott says he draws inspiration from the replacement of hand-crafted local materials with industrially produced materials and a resulting loss of traditional skills.

“By combining a diminutive version of this building system with chairs and other objects pulled from the everyday domestic environment I honor the logic and engineering brilliance of stud frame construction, taking what we usually only see when we pass by construction sites, and exaggerating it in a way that renews our vision and understanding. The work uses the bandsaw as a scale sawmill to generate perfectly proportioned raw materials. An engagement emerges between the architecture and found objects, each bringing it’s own visual language while differently scaled systems try to occupy the same space. Unexpected solutions often emerge from the two finding ways to accommodate the other, and pointing to the deep relationship between the design of domestic objects and the architecture of the space itself.”

In a 2014 interview with 365 artists 365 days, Lott explains that he grew up living around cities as big as Chicago as well as tiny towns with populations under 400. “That tension between those two environments has continued to be a source of fascination, from the greater concentration of wealth in cities, to the differences, and similarities in the built environments and everyday lives of people who reside there,” he says.

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For a sense of the scale of these works, check out Lott’s Instagram, where you can see images and videos of the work in progress.

via This is Colossal

If all the official signage that can be found around an average city bores you, you might not even notice the ones that are a little bit off, warning you of dangerous pigeons and tiny sinkholes or explaining the history of awkward silences in the area. Some are so small, they’re easy to just pass right by – like the one situated next to some velvet ropes and a mouse hole that reads “please wait here until called.” Your loss, really, because in this case, sharp observational skills really pay off.

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Australian artist Michael Pederson, better known as ‘Miguel Marquez Outside,’ isn’t interested in art galleries. He prefers to hide his strange and witty signs throughout cities like Sydney to be noticed and enjoyed by the public. A mental health worker by day, Pederson installs his temporary works as quickly as possible knowing they could be up for mere minutes or last for months. It’s all good as long as they make someone smile or help get them out of their own heads, he says.

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A post shared by Michael Pederson (@miguelmarquezoutside)

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A post shared by Michael Pederson (@miguelmarquezoutside)

Pederson’s latest round of signs are even smaller than usual, alerting passersby to sidewalk weeds, questionable holes in shrubbery, exits to other dimensions and what they should do in the event of accidental staring on the bus. Previously, his installations have given parks solitude ratings, offered ‘personal space preference cards’ to pass out in public, and encouraged people to press a button so a trained proxy can go into a secluded wilderness area and scream on their behalf.

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A post shared by Michael Pederson (@miguelmarquezoutside)

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A post shared by Michael Pederson (@miguelmarquezoutside)

If stuff like this won’t prompt you to pay closer attention to your surroundings, what will? Follow Pederson’s work on Instagram @MiguelMarquezOutside or on tumblr.

Nature begins to take back New York City after all the humans are gone in this series of artfully photographed post-apocalypse miniatures. A collaboration between artists Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, ‘Empire’ is the duo’s second series on this theme, the first focusing on interiors while the latest depicts exterior scenes. Living in New York provides all the inspiration the artists need, particularly subway rides between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and all of the architectural detail that can be appreciated if you just look up.

Nix is the architect of these tiny structures, while Gerber is the sculptor. The work is labor-intensive, with a single diorama taking anywhere from three to fifteen months to complete. They start each piece in their apartment, and then move to the outside studio when it’s close to being finished to set it up for documentation. The lighting and the tiny details are what give each one its realistic edge.

The materials used include basswood, extruded foam sheets, acrylic, polymer clay and epoxy. The most challenging aspect of the work is making those materials look like something else – for instance, turning a tiny piece of foam and wood into a leather and steel office chair.

“I don’t really have a death wish, it just seems that way,” says Nix. “For the last eight years my photographs have highlighted a fictional urban landscape ‘after’. An aquarium after a flood, a church after a fire, a beauty parlor after…who knows what. Mankind is gone and what remains are vacant fragments of buildings, a few slowly being reclaimed by nature.”

“‘The City’ imagines what New York City and Brooklyn would look like if suddenly mankind had disappeared. The exact cause for the desertion is left vague. Was it a natural disaster, a virus, global warming, war? A few images hint at the destructive history of the space – a library dome crushed by a tornado or a subway car filled with sand. To me, imagining something so globally catastrophic is both chilling and exciting. I often wonder about my own survival instincts when pondering an emptying city.”

Empire, on the other hand, “presents a world transformed by climate uncertainty and a shifting social order as it stumbles towards a new kind of frontier. These places are eerily beautiful but also unsettling in their stillness and silence. Long ago, man entered the landscape and forced nature to his will. Once grand and emblematic of strength and prosperity, these landscapes now appear abused and in decay, and it is uncertain how they will continue to (d)evolve.”

No object is too ordinary or random to end up being used as a stand-in for a full-scale building, boat, landscape or prop in art director and photographer Tatsuya Tanaka’s imaginative miniature landscapes, released each and every day on an online calendar. There’s a donut island, a record player as a lake, a literal sushi train, tiny European houses made of clips and dice, disposable razor ski lifts, brush bristle fields and even a cracked iPhone standing in for a hole in an icy lake.

With thousands of these brilliant photographs under his belt, Tanaka has amassed a following of no less than one million on Instagram. His work is so consistently clever and surprising, you might find yourself opening the app first thing in the morning wondering what in the world he possibly could have thought up this time. The little scenes will make you look at everyday objects in a whole new way.

“Everyone must have had thoughts like these before: broccoli and parsley may sometimeslook like a forest of trees, and tree leaves floating on the surface of water may sometimes look like little boats. Everyday occurrences seen from a miniature perspective can bring us lots of fun thoughts. I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs, so I started to put together a ‘MINIATURE CALENDAR,’” says Tanaka.

“These photographs primarily depict diorama-style figures surrounded by daily necessities. Just like a standard daily calendar, the photos are updated daily on my website and SNS page, earning it the name of ‘MINIATURE CALENDAR.’ It would be great if you could use it to add a little enjoyment to your everyday life.”

A pencil is usually a tool, but what happens when artists subvert its common usage, transforming it into a medium for sculpting instead? Extraordinary sculpting skills paired with a steady hand and a magnifying glass make it possible to carve amazingly tiny figures out of the pencil’s lead. Some artists see flowers or portraits in cast-off pencil shavings, or glue masses of the writing instruments together to sculpt and sand them into new forms punctuated by the graphite or colored pigments inside each pencil’s core.

Pencil Lead Carvings by Salavat Fidai

HBO Asia recently commissioned an incredible set of Game of Thrones-themed pencil lead carvings from Russian artist Salavat Fidai, including the sigils of each House, a White Walker, the dragons and the Iron Throne. It takes Fidai about 6 to 12 hours to sculpt each one using a craft knife, a magnifying glass and a microscope. The artist says the most challenging piece in the collection was the throne, which took over three weeks to perfect. Of course, the Game of Thrones pieces are just the latest works from Fidai, who has also carved tiny architecture, superheroes and other fictional characters, and much more.

Vases Made of Pencils by Studio Markunpoika

Hundreds of pencils are glued together into a solid mass and then carved on a machine lathe to create vases and other decorative objects, revealing the insides of the pencils. Studio Markunpoika describes their process: “‘Amalgamated’ is a collection which explores the relationship of a mass produced ‘tool’ and its individual purpose. The beauty of the pencil as an object seems to go unnoticed if utilized only for their primary purpose. ‘Amalgamated’ is a visual and tactile investigation using pencils as a raw material. This holistic principle has been the fundament for creating this set of vases; let the pencils become a thing themselves.”

Pencil Lead Carvings by Dalton Ghetti

The most impressive works by Dalton Ghetti are undoubtedly those which turn single pencil leads into chains. You can’t help but stare at each one for a while, wondering how he managed to pull them off. The fact that the artist has been refining his process since childhood might tell you a thing or two about how he’s able to pull pieces like these off – or that some of his pieces can take months or even years to complete. He also carves his tiny sculptures without the aid of a microscope or magnifying glass, using sewing needles and razor blades.

Pencil Sculptures by Jennifer Maestre

The colorful bristling creatures of Jennifer Maestre seem to have come from the depths of the sea, their appendages recalling the natural shapes of urchins, anemones, coral, octopi and jellyfish. The artist uses colored pencils as a medium for her unusual sculptures. “The spines of the urchin, so dangerous yet beautiful, serve as an explicit warning against contact. The alluring texture of the spines draws the touch in spite of the possible consequences. The tension unveiled, we feel push and pull, desire and repulsion. The sections of pencils present aspects of sharp and smooth for two very different textural and aesthetic experiences. Paradox and surprise are integral in my choice of materials.”

Pencil Lead Carvings by Cindy Chinn

Cindy Chinn takes advantage of the length of graphite contained within a pencil, tunnel-like inside the wood, and translates it into lines of marching elephants or trains. Her ‘Elephant Walk’ series was commissioned by the California-based Epiphany Elephant Museum. Of the train piece, Chinn says “This piece was designed using straight lead pieces for the rails, with the tiny carved train placed and securely glued on top of the rails. The train engine is only 3/16” of an inch tall. The pencil is 5-5/8” long and mounted in a wood shadowbox frame as shown in the photos.”

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