I never dug dissecting critters in biology class at school. I understood its relevance but always thought there must be some better way of discovering how a frog, or a rat, or a mouse worked—hadn’t millions of these little fuckers been sliced and diced by more knowledgeable people before me? I wasn’t being wimpy, I just knew too many weirdos who, inspired by their gory handwork in class, bragged about clipping the fins off fish from the local pond for the jollies.

Artist Sabine Feliciano may have had similar thoughts about dissection class. She makes textile sculptures of dissected animals with their beautiful guts displayed for all to see. Feliciano transforms materials, or what she describes as the “thread of life,” into woven, crocheted, and stitched colorful representations of anatomized animals. Her intention is to “transcribe a sensation,” causing a visceral response in the viewer, which I’m sure it does. (“It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”) She also adds pearls and stones to her work. The finished result is an oddly disturbing mix of disemboweled toy and a strange and beautiful memento mori—which invites our touch.

Feliciano has been exhibiting her textile work or Wild Textile World since 2006. A graduate of the Ecole d’art Graphique et de Communication Visuelle, in Paris, Feliciano worked as a graphic designer and as an artistic director at Publicis & Nous and at the AirParisAgency before starting her career as a freelance graphic designer. She certainly has a unique and unusual sense of macabre fun. See more of this talented artist’s work here.
 

 

 
More dissected critters, after the jump…
 

 
Emily Stoneking says, “If my hands aren’t busy, I’m not happy.” Currently studying German and History at the University of Vermont, Stoneking has an Etsy store featuring crocheted jar cozies and knitted whimsical anatomical studies has allowed her “the freedom to not work for someone else full time, so I can attend school.”

Here we can see Stoneking’s knitted versions of dissected frog, lab rat, earthworm, little alien dude, fetal pig as well as two anatomical studies.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Anatomical art generally generally depicts recognizable, perfectly formed parts or figures, flayed open to display all the beauty and genius of our design. It’s medical, certainly, but it’s usually a testament to the beauty of the human body. Photographer Adam Voorhes goes in an entirely different direction in the book Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital. How he came across his evocative subjects is a surreal story. From the book’s description:

Hidden away out of sight in a forgotten storage closet deep within the bowels of the University of Texas State Mental Hospital languished a forgotten, but unique and exceptional, collection of hundreds of extremely rare, malformed, or damaged human brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

Decades later, in 2013, photographer Adam Voorhes discovered the brains and became obsessed with documenting them in close-up, high-resolution, large format photographs, revealing their oddities, textures, and otherworldly essence. Voorhes donned a respirator and chemical gloves, and began the painstaking process of photographing the collection.

Not only had decades worth of rare brains just been tossed aside, Voorhes learned that their abandonment followed a “Battle for the Brains,” where even Harvard attempted to get ahold of the collection. By the time Voorhes began photographing them, half were missing, and many of the remaining specimens suffered from neglect. Working with a journalist, he set out to find the rest of the brains, even renewing interest in the collection—The University of Texas is doing MRI scans on them now.

Sadly, many of the brains were likely disposed of after a lack of resources and care left them to fallow (and bureaucracy failed to record it). It was reported just yesterday that 100 of the brains were thrown out in 2002, as they had deteriorated beyond medical usage—one was rumored to be the brain of Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who went on a shooting spree from the University of Texas at Austin clock tower that killed 16 people in 1966. Many brains remain missing, and people are still trying to track them down.
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

frog on dissection tray
 
I seem to remember being one of the kids that refused to dissect a frog in Biology class, but I wonder if I could have swung a passing grade if I had offered to do a mock-dissection with one of these beautiful knitted specimens from aKNITomy. Look at those lovely little felted innards! My first concern was actually that I might not be able to remove the creatures from their mounts for fun pranks, but no!

He comes pinned into his actual dissection tray (never used!), but he is not glued down, so you can take him out and cuddle him if you wish.

Fantastic! In addition to hiding one of these ghastlies in your infantile roommate’s childhood teddy bear display, you can actually cuddle with these disemboweled stuffed animals! A cute touch I noticed was the dead-as-a-doornail “x’s” over all the eyes ... all except the alien.. who stares at you, all blank and lidless. The description says “alien autopsy,” but are we dealing with knitted extraterrestrial vivisection here? Because I just don’t think I can ethically support yarn-alien cruelty.
 

rat on dissection tray
 

fetal pig on framed cork
 

bat on framed foam core
 
More, including the alien autopsy, after the jump…