Bizarre or trending subjects, catch a break with our curiosity of the week. Conceptual artist Carl Warner creates Bodyscapes – strange mountainous landscapes… composed of human bodies.
As he was roaming around a market, artist and photographer Carl Warner imagined, for the first time, a foodscape – a surreal landscape made of food. Roasted potatoes rocks, broccoli forests… His creations quickly became popular. “Then, the film Zabriskie Point which had scenes of naked bodies rolling around in a dusty, rocky landscape, inspired me. I was fascinated by the relationship between body and landscape”, he continues. From food, the artist turned to human, and transformed silhouettes into organic sculptures.
Giving one’s body to art
Each of Carl Warner’s images is composed carefully, presenting only one model, captured from different angles. “I know people would love these to be made with many different bodies, but doing this will mean having different skin tones which will lose the sense of continuity within the landscape”, he says. Alone, with his subject, the photographer builds, one by one, the necessary shots to erect mounts and dig valleys.
It is the aesthetic perfection that the artist is seeking. Photographing a unique body enables him to put aside any sensual dimension, and focus on the image, the illusion. Before his lens, limbs become mountains and the skin evokes the earth, burnt by the sun. Always hidden, faces hardly matter. Only the neck’s curves appear. The models do not share their emotions with us, but give, without compromise, their bodies to art. Their abandon helping Carl Warner place his peaks, model his craters, his plains, as he wishes. A most creative sculptural body of art.
© Carl Warner
