#insectophile

Edouard Martinet has become the art world's virtuoso insectophile, transforming bits and pieces of cast-off junk culled from flea markets and car boot sales into an exquisitely executed insect, fish and animal forms.

Insectophile Edouard Martinet por Sladmore Contemporary

Take one workshop full of junk and a Frenchman with an eye for detail (not to mention an obsession with bugs) and you will find the most eclectic mix of metal insects this side of a sci-fi novel. This short documentary follows Edouard Martinet's patient and extraordinary process as he creates sculptures that are utterly beautiful, distinctly creepy and somehow completely true to nature. All this despite his medium being piles of bent metal and old rusty bicycles.

From: Sladmore Contemporary 

I will definitely continue to post on this blog, though it may be a bit sporadic and may stray from being solely insects to include other organisms :) In a couple weeks I’ll be participating in an ecological survey in western Maryland, and I’ll be sure to upload a lot of photos from that event! I may also post other wasp photos I took during my internship in the meantime. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading my blog and supporting me for the past year! 

This photograph, like the previous one of Acanthoscelio, was created to be a huge, poster-sized image. This one went through a bit more clean-up than the other, as the depth of the objects in the photo varied much more, which caused the software to have more trouble properly stacking the photos. This specimen came from a lab where they raise wasps for study, and these eggs happened to be put in the kill jar (or however they killed them) just as a tiny wasp was emerging! Just to clarify though, these are parasitic wasps - meaning they lay their eggs in the eggs or larva of other bugs. These eggs are NOT wasp eggs, they’re some sort of hemipteran, or true bug. Or rather, they were!

Though once again I had to shrink the image down to be able to upload it, this is one of the images I’m most proud of. This is a composite of 40 images (each of the 40 a stacked image in of itself) that took me a whole day to photograph, combine, and clean. The full file is 390MB, to give you an idea of how big the photo is. This photo was created with the goal of printing it out to make a large poster.

Today was such a fun day! Two of my coworkers know a woman that works with the insects in the insect zoo, and today she showed us around the room where they keep all the insects and let us hold some of them! I don’t think I heard half of what she was telling us because I was so focused on the amazing creatures I was holding. Click the photos to read their captions!