German-based artist David Zink Yi created a series of sculptures in the likenesses of dead Architeuthis, the giant squid. Using a mixture of lead and copper glazes he created a varied metallic sheen on each of his ceramic colossal cephalopods. Only one of these art works is not lying in a large pool of blue ink, The Mass Ornament.
Art gallery Hauser & Wirth explains a little about Zink Yi’s squid art:
The subject of lore and fine art for centuries, the Architeuthis emerges to human view only at its death, when it washes onto shore and is deposited at the border where the opposing but interdependent worlds of land and sea meet. Zink Yi’s dying squid sprawls across the gallery floor, a body without breath. Its 16-foot, deflated, creamy pale form rests in a pool of glistening dark liquid, provoking the viewer into a powerful encounter with the unfamiliar. Intended less as narration than as a pedestal or frame for the work, this liquid brings the viewer back to awareness of the alchemy involved in its making. Looking like tons of dead animal protein, Zink Yi’s Architeuthis is in fact a 660-pound ceramic object achieved through a tremendously difficult process that pushes the material to the very limits of its potential. Through a literal and figurative trial by fire at more than 1200 degrees centigrade, Zink Yi thus fixes a body at the border of two other opposing but interdependent worlds: the realms of grotesque and the precious.
images via David Zink Yi and Hauser & Wirth
