Ann P. Smith is a famous American artist who uses broken electronics and machine parts to create unique robotic sculptures.

A resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Ann P. Smith graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she first got the inspiration for her unique art. She had received an assignment to create a three-dimensional technology illustration , but she was completely stumped until she saw a heap of junk with a telephone on top, which she used to create a horse sculpture. This won her great reviews and kickstarted her career as an upcycling artist.

The mechanical menagerie Ann created throughout the years contains a wide range of intricate creatures – goats, birds, jellyfish, lizards, etc – all made from computer components, discarded cell phones and various other salvaged scraps. Each creation has a unique personality reflected by the carefully chosen materials it’s made of, and is labeled by a line of keyboard keys.

..

They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop, so inmate Daniel Watson tries to keep busy by creating these beautiful sculptures out of dried citrus.

I stumbled across Daniel Watson’s unique creations while reading Accidental Mysteries (the coolest outsider art blog I know) and they immediately caught my eye. They may look like ancient artifacts, but they’re really just dried citrus skins carved by Daniel, in his spare time. He’s serving a life sentence in a California penitentiary, so he’s got lots of time on his hands…

Described as “hovering somewhere between Pre-Columbian and alien,” Daniel Watson’s dried citrus skin sculptures have been sold at various art auctions. The two artworks below were created in 1998, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of his more recent creations. If anyone knows anything more about the artist and his work, please share with the rest of us.

..

American artist Chris Cole uses scrap metal parts to explore the border between nature and industry, by creating unique mechanical creatures.

As a young boy, Chris grew up in the American Northwest, surrounded by an abundance of wildlife that later influenced his art. At the same time, he always had a passion for all things mechanical, and would often take stuff apart, only to put them back together in a radical new way. Nowadays, he creates moving creatures, especially from the avian and aquatic reigns, from various scrap metal parts, connected by heavy bolts and operated by bicycle chains and small motors.

While he is still fascinated by machinery, and was greatly influenced by the visionaries of the industrial revolution, Chris Cole is very concerned with man’s “disconnection with the natural world”, and his work represents a “regression  from mechanism back to organism.”

..

Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York recently hosted Erwin Wurm’s Gulp exhibition, an eccentric yet interesting approach on modern society.

Using furniture, clothing or even statues representing humans, Erwin Wurm makes an attempt to express the way everything surrounding us can form or  even deform an individual. Almost unwillingly  the viewer finds himself involved in this intricate dialogue engendered by Wurm through his art.

Explaining the addressability of  his art but also his purpose, the artist says “I want to address serious matters, but in a light way. I want to reach more than just an elite circle of insiders. My work speaks about the whole entity of a human being: the physical, the spiritual, the psychological and the political.”

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian-born artist. His work has always been about a giving the viewers a new perspective on life and on how they relate to everyday objects or situations, managing to provoke it’s viewers imagination and, in a certain way, reinterpreting the whole concept of sculpture.

..

Zhu Cheng, one of China’s most famous and talented sculptors, has helped nine of his art students to create a replica of Venus de Milo out of excrements.

Now, I know we’ve had quite a few strange art mediums here at Oddity Central, from garbage to chewing gum, but excrement has to be the weirdest one yet, by a long shot. Zhu Cheng helped and direct a team of nine art students to recreate the Venus de Milo statue out of feces. Now, the source doesn’t actually specify if we’re talking about animal or human excrements, but I’m pretty sure it’s the last one…A symbol of beauty created from something so disgusting, the idea is pretty cool, but I can’t help but be grossed out by the thought of having to mold feces into a statue with your hands.

Ad you can see in the photos, the excrement-made Venus de Milo is encased in a transparent box, to protect it, and make sure the smell of crap doesn’t drive everyone away from the exhibition at Henan Art Museum in Zhengzhou city, China.

But the most unbelievable thing about this “shity” statue of Venus de Milo is that it was actually bought by a Swiss art collector, for a staggering 300,000 yuan ($45,113). Talk about spending money on crap, right?

..

Every year, dozens of teams of architects and engineers compete in creating the most impressive can sculptures for the Canstruction exhibition.

This year, 25 teams did their vest to arrange around 100,000 cans of food into detailed sculptures that would ultimately win them the title of Canstruction champions. The intricate works of art are on display at the World Financial Center Garden, in New York City, until November 22, and visitors are encouraged to donate canned foods like tuna, beans or vegetables. Once the exhibition closes, all the cans are donated to the poor people of New York, by City Harvest.

Last year’s Canstruction winner was a piggy-bank sculpture made from 3.024 cans of salmon and 24 cans of tuna, but this year, judges have a tough decision to make. They have to pick between mosaics of Marylin Monroe and Super Mario, a can-made van and several other mind-blowing creations.

..

Ptolemy Elrington spends his time collecting hub caps lost on the streets of Britain, and transforming them into impressive-looking animal sculptures.

To prove that “one person’s junk is another man’s treasure”, 43-year-old Ptolemy Elrington has chosen to use reclaimed materials, like hub caps, as the main medium of his art. After finishing college, the Bradford-based sculptor lived close to a sharp curve where cars would often lose their hub caps. He began collecting them from the roadside ditch, and planned to turn them all into an original suit of armor, but noticing they had a marine look about them, he decided to mold them into fish.

After he gave his first sculptures to his family, as gifts, friends started coming to him asking for some hub-cap sculptures of their own. Elrington realized the business potential of his art, and now spends most of his time creating animal sculptures in his workshop. Because his work materials are practically free, he only charges customers for his time, about 75 British pounds per day. His most expensive work so far, a 10 meter tall dragon made out of 200 lost hub caps cost 3,000 pounds, but most of his works are sold for a few hundreds.

A strong supporter of recycling, Ptolemy Elrington only uses discarded materials. He never buys hubcaps, he always uses lost ones, and even the wire used to tie the hubcap pieces together comes from the junkyard.

After seven years of hub cap sculpting, Elrington says he is a fan of luxury car hub caps, from BMW or Mercedes, because they can be flexed more,and hardly ever snap.

..

Dutch artist Wieki Somers pushes the boundaries of recycling in her project “Consume or Conserve”, which plays with the idea of turning our loved ones’ ashes into everyday household items.

Instead of burying or cremating a beloved family member, wouldn’t you rather give this person a second life as a vacuum cleaner, or a toaster? This way you could cherish them forever, and they in term could feel useful by helping you with your daily chores. And would having our household items made from someone dear make us more attached to them, instead of quickly throwing them away as waste? That’s basically the idea behind Wieki Somers’ sculptures made from human ashes. Depicting weird scenes featuring toasters and dead birds, vacuum cleaners and dung beetles, and weighing scales and bees, these unusual artworks also come with a plaque stating the name and lifetime of the person they were created from.

For her human ashes sculpture series, Wieki Somers used donated remains and a 3D printer.

..

Sculptor Ian Brennan has spent 5,000 hours, in the last 17 years, carving a piece of timber into a miniature replica of admiral Nelson’s famous HMS Victory.

60-year-old Brennan, from Warsash, England, only became a full-time sculptor when he was 34, but in just five years time he became a sculptor of the Royal House. That’s how he ended up doing restorative work on the real HMS Victory, for about a year. As recognition for a job well done, Ian Brennan received a piece of timber from the legendary ship, which he later decided to use as material for a small scale replica of the Victory.

While you may think centuries old wood would be easier to carve, this particular piece of timber was as hard as concrete, and Ian had to much more work into it than expected. 5,000 hours, throughout 17 years, to be exact, during which he went through several pairs of overalls and cut himself countless times. Just like the original HMS Victory, Ian’s replica features 104 guns, 37 sails, flags bearing Nelson’s inspirational signal ‘England expects every man to do his duty’, as well as 200 feet of intricate rope.

Ian Brennan knew he only had one chance at doing something like this, as he would never again get another piece of timber from the original HMS Victory, so he made sure his 47-inch replica was just perfect. His family has been very supportive throughout the 17 years of work, although I’m sure his wife Suzanne wished her husband spent more of his free time with her.

..

Old army helmets seem pretty useless in these modern times, but artist Fred Conlon has found a pretty good use for them, and it doesn’t involve a museum.

Growing up in small Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Fred Conlon was always fascinated by art, but it wasn’t until he graduated from the University of Utah, with a degree in Public Communications, that he decided to open a pottery shop. With only his family’s support and 15 credits in pottery classes, Fred fulfilled his dream and opened Sugar Post Pottery, in Salt Lake City. Throughout the years, he discovered his passion for working with metal, old war gear in particular, and his original helmet sculptures are just some of his wonderful creations.

..

Italian artist Maurizio Savini has spent the last ten years creating amazing sculptures out of thousands of pieces of bright pink chewing gum.

Chewing gum may not be the most common media of the art world, but to 39-year-old Maurizio Savini it’s the most versatile material available. It’s easy to manipulate when warm, and can be cut with a knife, just like clay. Regardless of what many may think, chewing gum sculpting is an established art form, recognized all over the world, and Savini’s artworks are eagerly awaited by critics and connoisseurs, alike.

Disgusting as it may seem to some people, Maurizio Savini uses thousands of chewed up pieces of bubble gum for each of his sculptures. He molds them into the desired shapes and when the whole thing is done, he fixes the sculpture with formaldehyde and antibiotics. The amazingly detailed chewing gum sculptures of Maurizio Savini have sold fro up to $60,000 each.

..

Artist Ivan Lovatt has recreated the faces of celebrities such as Michael Jackson or The Beatles, using nothing but chicken wire.

Ivan Lovatt is one of those artists who are always looking for new media to experiment with, and for him chicken wire proved to be just what he needed. Before starting to mold chicken wire into intricate portraits, Ivan used it to give structure to some of his earlier sculptures. At one point, he began creating wildlife out of the unusual medium, and as his skills developed, he moved to celebrity portraits.

Most of his wire portraits take over a month to complete and about one and a half times larger than life size. Somehow, he manages to twist, bend and pin the wire in such a way that his portraits end up so detailed you can actually see every hair on their head. He became a professional sculptor six years ago, and since then , his works have been displayed in galleries and museums all around the world.

..

Although he only recently graduated from the Nihon University College of Art, Shojiro Yamauchi is already considered one of the most talented metal sculptors in Japan. His most recent collection, entitled “Inhabitants of a Certain Planet”, features giant steampunk insects, including a cicada with its wings spread, a spider and a number of large ants. You can see the marksmanship of the artist in the detailed photos below.

..

Get ready for a “can you believe the’re made of wood?!?” moment folks, because the sculpted clothes of Fraser Smith are unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

Fraser Smith is a very talented wood sculptor who creates tromp l’oeil works using various soft wood essences. He specializes in carving the kind of things no one would ever believe could be created from wooden blocks, and manages to fool the human eye every time. At every one of his exhibitions, you’ll always here things like “Wow, there’s no way these are made of wood!” Yes, his wooden sculptures are so good most people can’t believe their eyes.

..

Part of the Green Dream Park, in Beijing, the 10-meter-tall statue of Optimus Prime managed to attract the gazes of many passers-by.

With all the Transformers statues, made from recycled materials, showing up everywhere I’m thinking they’re a great way of raising awareness to the problems of the environment, especially as far as young people are concerned.

Assembled near Bird’s Nest Stadium, in Beijing, the 10-meter-tall leader of the Autobots is made only from waste materials, brought in all the way from Taiwan. But this awesome Optimus Prime statue goes to show you that just because something is made from junk, doesn’t mean it’s junk.

..