TankBooks

Tank (a creative agency and publishing company based in the UK) has designed a series of classics to take our breath away while the smoking ban takes hold of our major (and not so major) cities. Packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane, I garautee they are just as addictive are their similarly designed counterparts.

Heart of Darkness is my personal favorite and biased suggestion, although you can rarely go wrong on a Kafka kick.

Hand Soap

While browsing online for a birthday gift for a Virgo friend of mine, I came across the coolest, and possibly creepiest item I've seen since the shrunken head jewelry that I fell in love with over a month ago.

Actual soap, shaped like tiny little hands. Using molds made from dolls, each "hand" is handmade and cared for like the doll it came from.

Brought to you by foliage.

Paper Cuts

The work of Peter Callesen, who lives and works out of Copenhagen, has been catching my eye as of late. His sculpture is bewildering.

He writes:

"My paper works has lately been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality. I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost as a magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is as well an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts".



What I find so smart and compelling about it, beyond the obvious mastery of the technique, is the fact that the process of making is revealed by leaving what's cut. Not only do we see the amazing composition and story of each piece, but we also get to see what's taken away to make it. The connection between the two parts is not severed, which makes each piece a bit more tense and provacative.

He also creates large scale installations that boggle the mind.