Morbid Companion – Woman Travels around the World with Life-Size Plastic Skeleton

Being a medical skeleton is pretty boring. You sit in a room all day, dust piling up in your orbital cavities, waiting for some know-it-all students to come and examine you and sometimes even tease you about your bones not being real. If only you could go out and explore the world outside the University walls. One happy anatomical correct model called Sam, got the chance of a (after)lifetime thanks to Susan Weese, who took her (yes, Sam is a “she”) on a yearlong trip around the world, immortalizing their visits with a photographic camera. Together, the odd pair have visited Venice, Pairs, Rome, New York and many other exciting tourist destinations.

The world tour began on November 1 – also known as Day of the Dead, last year and was entitled “Sam 365.” Susan’s idea came to her on Halloween, after driving around with a skeleton – other than Sam –  in the passenger’s seat. Fellow fright lovers on the motorway honked their horns, showing Weese their appreciation for the unusual idea. Susan, who worked on medical illustrations 30 years ago, carried the 42lbs skeleton everywhere she went on the trip but it was not an easy task. “Sam is 42lbs and if I carry her in my arms I get bruises everywhere,” the woman explains. Traveling with a skeleton can be problematic in airports, as well. “She flies over sized, which is hard getting through airports. She got held up by the Department of Agriculture in Newark because they had to make she was not real bone.” Nonetheless, the ambitious woman is determined to take the model everywhere. “The only day I could take pictures when we were in New York was a cold, rainy and windy one. Carrying her across Brooklyn Bridge was no easy task,” Susan says.

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The Art of Bones, by Francois Robert

Francois Robert creates iconic shapes, using dozens of real human bones. He spends entire days on his knees, but the results are truly exceptional.

Francois has always been fascinated by skeletons, but it wasn’t until a day, in the mid 1990s, that he came face to face with one. He was at a yard sale, in Michigan, checking out some desks, for his office. He stumbled across three, two of which were empty,m and the third, with a complete human skeleton, inside. He took them all to his studio.

In 2007, as the recession began to think its teeth into the economy, Mr. Robert had so much time on his hands that he decided to turn to the skeleton in his closet. Because its parts were wired together, for educational purposes, the artist decided he needed one that could be broken down into pieces. So he traded his skeleton, for a box filled with 206 real human bones.

Since then, Francois Robert has been spending most of his days, on his knees, arranging even the tiniest bones into the right position, for the perfect shot. His collection is called “Stop the Violence”, and it was inspired by the author’s fear of death. He says “”The bones are something left behind, a form of memory, I try to treat that person on my studio floor with respect.”

via DesignObserver

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