Song Dong’s Waste Not at the Barbican

Waste Not, an installation that gathers over 10,000 everyday objects collected by Song Dong’s mother over a period of five decades, reflects on the Chinese artist’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution. Waste Not is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2, from 15 February to 12 June. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images.


Song Dong’s Waste Not installation in the Curve at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Continue reading »

Boynton Beach Peacocks: When is Beauty Bad?

Anybody want a peacock? How about 200?

The Fox Hollow community in Boynton Beach is considering paying a trapper $6,000 to round up half the neighborhood population of peafowl and kill them.

“I want every one of them out of here,” said resident Dorothy Laswell. “They bang on my French doors, throw themselves at my windows, and wake me up every morning, jumping on my roof at 6 o’clock. And during mating season, they scream and holler.”

Similar complaints have led Fox Hollow to invite a trapper to spend weeks in the neighborhood assessing the population and figuring out what can be done. There are an estimated 400 peafowl living in Fox Hollow, and they have their defenders. So the homeowner’s association is considering a compromise of sorts: eliminating half the bird population.

Story by Frank Cerabino.
Photography by Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post.


The Fox Hollow community in Boynton Beach is proposing to remove a couple of hundred peacocks that live on the gated community’s property. They apparently escaped years ago from nearby Knollwood Groves, where they were an attraction until the groves were torn down for another housing development. Continue reading »

Photo of the Day: Frozen Roses


Roses are protected in a cocoon of ice as temperatures dipped below freezing at Dewar Nurseries in Apopka, Florida. (Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/MCT) Click image to zoom.

iOS ’86


Fantastic iOS concept, created by Anton Repponen. Continue reading »

Miniature Gardens of Steve Wheen


It reminds me a street art. Londoner Steve Wheen brings greenery and miniature scenes to the streets of East London in his ‘the pot hole gardener’ project and it looks fantastic! Continue reading »

Britain’s Big Freeze Continues

Visitors to the Fenlands in eastern England take advantage of sub-zero temperatures to enjoy skating on the frozen fens. Some areas of the region have seen temperatures plunge to as low as -18C in recent days.


The sun rises over a frost-covered scene in in Earith, Cambridgeshire. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Continue reading »

Animal Carnival in Rio de Janeiro


The animal carnival parade at Copacabana beach in Brazil rivals its human counterpart for colour. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images, Silvia Izquierdo/AP. Continue reading »

Photo of the Day: Let the Battle Begin


A small boat, bottom, from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Steve Irwin, left top, chases down the Japanese harpoon vessel Yushin Maru No. 2 in a confrontation between the whalers and anti-whaling activists in the Antarctica Sea. (Billy Danger/Sea Shepherd) Click image to zoom.

Finalists of Miss Helsinki 2012


I love Helsinki so much, but I’m… confused. Continue reading »

The Art of the App: Works made on iPads and iPhones


Kissed by the Sun, by Xi Chen. Continue reading »

The Bedouin Skate Crew in Tunisia


Bringing peace through skateboarding and street art. Photograph: Nathan Gray. Continue reading »

The Nissan Production Line

Nissan’s factory in Washington, near Sunderland, in Tyne and Wear, builds the Qashqai, Juke and Note models. It produced 480,485 cars in 2011, a record for a UK car plant. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian.


Nissan’s production line in Washington, Tyne and Wear. Continue reading »

Spectacular Images of Northern Lights Captured from Space


The aurora borealis steals the show in this nighttime photograph shot from the International Space Station as the orbital outpost flew over the Midwest recently. Cloud cover makes it difficult to identify the cities that are within the captured area. The spacecraft was above south-central Nebraska when the photo was taken. The angle of the look is northward to northeastward. (ISS030-E-061267 http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/) Continue reading »

Photo of the Day: Boy’s Best Friends Sit out Flood


A boy shares a bench with two dogs as floodwaters rise in the southern Queensland town of St. George, Australia on February 4, 2012. (ABC) Click image to zoom.

Belfast Peace Walls

Antonio Olmos photographs the walls built across Northern Ireland’s capital city as a means of defusing sectarian tension. There are 99 of them, dividing nationalist Catholic neighbourhoods from loyalist Protestant ones. Some of the walls date from the early years of the Troubles, but an estimated one-third have gone up since the IRA ceasefire in 1994. Now, ‘peace gates’ are being opened in some walls in an attempt to foster greater links between communities.


The biggest peace wall in Belfast runs along Cupar Way. It divides the east Belfast loyalist area of Shankill Road from the Catholic Springfield/Falls Roads area of west Belfast. Continue reading »

Inside Ciccolella, Italy’s Leading Producer of Cut Flowers

The free movement of goods in Europe has allowed a flower producer to bloom in an area of Italy with 15% unemployment. Photograph: Mario Laporta/Controluce


Ciccolella has about 100 hectares of greenhouses at its production sites in Italy. Continue reading »

Seeing spots: Yayoi Kusama Exhibition at Tate Modern

The polka dot-obsessed octogenerian artist Yayoi Kusama’s work has gone from free love and foraging in the 50s and 60s to infinity rooms filled with mirrors and twinkling lights in this decade. Her life has seen body parties in Andy Warhol’s Factory and friendships with Georgia O’Keeffe, Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell – and this retrospective takes it all in. At Tate Modern, London from 9 February to 5 June 2012. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian.


The octogenarian artist photographed in front of Yellow Trees (1994). This is the first time Kusama has left Japan in 12 years. Continue reading »

How to Make a Doner Kebab


1. You’ll need 500g of lamb breast, an onion, some salt, garlic, cumin and coriander for this first phase. Yes, that is a 1lb tin of spinach purée in the background. Bear with me and it will all make sense. Continue reading »

Photo of the Day: Stonehenge in Snow


Snow envelops Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, England. (Chris Ison/PA) Click image to zoom.

The Sony World Photography Awards 2012: Student Focus Shortlist


The Danish School of Media & Journalism: this image is entitled Escaping the Heat
Photograph: Nikolai Linares/Sony World Photography Awards 2012 Continue reading »

Designs of the Year

The Design Museum’s new exhibition shows us the past year in 89 designs, from a virtual supermarket to a super-lightweight wheelchair.


Tesco Virtual Store in Seomyeon subway in Seoul, South Korea, designed by Home plus.
These touchscreen supermarket shelves offer online shopping on an underground platform. Continue reading »

Photo of the Day: Walk Alone


A man walks along a snow-covered railway track in Shimla, India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh. (AFP)

Tower of Books


A three-story sculpture “tower of books” representing over 15,000 titles that have been written about Abraham Lincoln, are part of an exhibit at the Ford’s Theater Center for Education and Leadership in Washington. (AP)

World’s Largest Textile Created from Golden Spider Silk Dazzles

A four-metre-long woven textile made from the silk of more than a million female Golden Orb spiders collected from the highlands of Madagascar is on display at the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London. The hand-woven brocaded textile, which is on display at the museum till June 5, 2012, is naturally golden in colour and took over four years to create.

It will be shown together with a new golden cape, currently being woven and embroidered in Madagascar, which will go on public display for the very first time at the V&A. The clothes have reportedly been made by Englishman Simon Peers, who lives in Madagascar, and American Nicholas Godley, and are the only large textiles in the world to have been made from spider silk.


Yellow woven spider silk cape. Continue reading »

How to Draw… Wolves


Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not children’s book author Nadia Shireen! She shows you how to turn one in to a great little drawing. Continue reading »