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Sculptor John Paul Azzopardi creates these lovely, elaborate skeletal structures from actual bones to a sort of “Refined Satanist” effect. The works invoke a kind of “pop pagan” iconography—ram’s heads, bats, a mysterious structure that looks like it belongs on an altar etc.—but the articulated detail of each sculpture prevents them from being perceived as too… “serial killer?” Azzopardi does not say where he gets his bones, but they appear to be small animal bones, or possibly small children’s bones, humanely sourced from crooked orphanages and Marilyn Manson’s trash cans.

From his site:

Bone is a collection of fossilized structures that explores the gentle temperance located within the constitution of sound, i.e. its very silent centre.  The architectural relationship that oscillates back and forth from the simple and the complex to the living and the dead connects space and form, creating existential structures of interwoven silence. The death embedded in its form, its life. This might confront the spectator with a spectre, the simulacrum of itself that stalls, halts being something in its tracks.

 

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Untitled 2009
 

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Study Detail from D. Mylius Opus Medico-Chymicum
 

Study Detail from D. Mylius Opus Medico-Chymicum
 

Study of Haeckel’s Vampyrus
 

Study of Haeckel’s Vampyrus
 

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Via Beautiful Decay