A mass of reclaimed, weathered wood of all shapes and sizes rises up to the cathedral ceiling of the Church of St. Peter the Puellier in Mairie d’Orleans – but don’t expect these stairs to go anywhere. Built by French artist Sambre, ‘Escalier de Secours’ (Fire Escape) brings a sense of chaos and disproportion into a space typically considered sacred.

Installed in the heart of the church, the staircase consists of a framework covered in randomly applied wooden slats, nailed on with no apparent rhyme or reason. Intentionally oversized, the stairs are much to large for any human to walk up, requiring a hands-and-knees climb to ascend.

The work invites visitors to discover the twelfth-century church, which is the oldest remaining intact in Orleans, in an entirely new and self-guided way. Looking up through the nest-like wooden mass from the ground floor, you catch only glimpses of the church’s vaults. Visitors can choose from a variety of paths to make their way through the space, metaphorically exploring the many options available in life.

Sambre is known for large-scale, seemingly haphazard sculptures and architectural installations made of reclaimed wood, including spheres and labyrinths built inside gallery spaces and warehouses.

You may have to crouch a little to take a journey through this system of tunnels, but it’s worth it to feel as if you’re traveling through the roots of an enormous tree. Artist Henrique Oliveira has transformed a bare white gallery space at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade in São Paulo with a cavernous installation that looks as if nature has taken over.

‘Transarquitetônica‘ fuses real tree branches with tunnels made from reclaimed scrap wood to create an interconnected organic mass that visitors can actually walk through. The wood is an inexpensive temporary siding , known as tapumes, which is often used to obscure construction sites and then discarded.

“It’s wood that has been taken from nature, has been cut down into geometric structures, and they have been used by society and discharged,” says Oliveira. “And I take it back and I rebuild the forms there again, creating true nature forms. It’s bringing back the tree aspects to the material. It’s not just an object, it’s an experience.”

Oliveira’s largest installation to date, ‘Transarquitetônica’ grew from the artist’s original vision because the space provided by the gallery was so vast. The installation will be on display through the end of November.

Artist Maskull Lasserre specializes in transforming ordinary objects into amazingly intricate, often somewhat unsettling works of art. His most recent work, ‘Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II), conjures a highly realistic anatomic model of a skull from a stack of outdated software manuals.

Lasserre used drills and hand tools to carefully chisel out areas of the compressed pages, carving out the skull as if it had been hiding in the books all along. It’s an interesting metaphor for the uselessness of the books, which no longer have any real value.

The artist’s previous projects include ‘Secret Carpentry’, in which the skeleton of a snake was carved out of a wooden axe handle – each tiny vertebrae smooth and distinct – as well as ‘Oracle’, a wooden picture frame with a corner chiseled into a child’s bottom teeth.

Another project, ‘Outliers’, involved reproducing animal tracks onto the rubber soles of shoes that were then worn to leave highly unlikely prints all over urban areas in the cities of Montreal, Ottawa, Boston and New York.

See more of Lasserre’s work at his website.