Kathryn Spence’s owl sculptures work on several levels at once. This Great Horned Owl is a Lear of birds, ragged but regal. Like an impressionist painting, up close, he’s a bundle of discordant rags - old clothes, bits of recycled cloth - but back away and the illusion of life kicks in. The tilt of his head is pure predator.
The most delicious thing to me is that a recycled cloth owl is cuddly and cozy (mmmm, soft), but also a brutal representation of the biological food chain. His flesh is made of shredded Beanie Babies! Which means he’s just like a real owl - or any carnivore. We’re Nature’s recycling.
These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
Andrew Severynko’s website reveals an idiosyncratic mix of pastoral watercolors, mixed media, and metal steampunk beasties. He’s represented by Williams Gallery.
Untitled (zebras) 2006
charcoal on paper
Julie Comnick
Yesterday I dropped by Julie Comnick’s new show at the Flashpoint Gallery in DC (Jan 4 - Feb 9). I say “dropped by” because, despite her obvious technical skill, my attention was fully engaged for only about five minutes. It’s a solid show, but it didn’t provoke me to the kind of reconsideration & reflection I demand from art on a scientific theme.
Here’s the press release:
In According To Their Kind, Julie Comnick’s exhibition of large-scale charcoal drawings, the artist explores issues of selective breeding and the human impact on the course of evolution. The installation at the Gallery at Flashpoint is comprised of five distinct series of drawings: quotations from the story of Noah’s Ark, depictions of animals paired and bound for breeding, tethered boats (arks), excerpts from modern reproductive medicine and magnifications of in vitro fertilization procedures. The juxtaposition of these images asks the viewer to consider several unsettling trends in contemporary society. While animals are selectively bred in captivity to revitalize endangered populations, humans are able to pre-select the genetic makeup of their children.
Did you catch all that? This show was, despite the small exhibition space, really five shows in one. All of the pieces are “untitled,” and they were so disparate it was difficult for me to take in the entire show as curated.
The grouping that flows best is the series of thirteen small framed drawings depicting the stages of an embryo created by in vitro fertilization. The broad strokes of charcoal suited this series remarkably well. That really is how an embryo looks through a light microscope: black and white, smudgy and grainy, against a stark white field. The careless tumbling of the round embryo from corner to corner of the field throughout the series of drawings successfully conveyed both the unpredictable randomness of development - will this embryo implant, or fail? - and a sort of playful geometric abstraction. I think they’re lovely, and at only $250 apiece, quite the steal.
However, Comnick seems intent on pushing not just the aesthetics of the embryo, but the ethics of it. And here’s where things get messier. The embryo drawings alternate with oversized reproductions of passages from various fertility manuals (example: “Third Party Reproduction: A Guide for Patients“) or the Bible, and with still larger renderings of zoo animals being bred in captivity. The effect of these juxtapositions, to me, was confusing. What, aside from human agency, is the common thread here?
Juxtaposing the passages about Noah’s ark with the portraits of endangered animals makes sense, perhaps, since the population of endangered animals in captivity comprises a sort of genetic ark; but these animals were being bred in the traditional way, not through IVF or biotechnology. I’m hardly an expert, but the restraints and tethers appeared similar to those used to breed common domesticated animals, such as horses; there was nothing exotic going on - except that once you mix restraints, including blindfolds, with apparently unwilling participants - and in the drawing of the lions, a snapping whip - you enter rather fraught territory. The animals were by no means anthropomorphized, but the context forced certain comparisons between human and animal reproduction that I’m not sure were intended!
Looking at these images, are we supposed to be disturbed by the violence of the breeding methods? Are we supposed to make the obvious connection to human reproduction? It seemed so to me. What relevance might such a visceral response have to evaluating our stance on biotechnologies like IVF? Would a response informed by these emotions be a valid entry to reconsidering a controversial subject, or a mere gut reaction? I think it’s relatively simple to create art depicting unfamiliar and disturbing aspects of biology - the science which is, after all, most intimate with sex and death. It’s harder to turn the unfamiliar and disturbing into something new, something that implies an unexpected conclusion, or asks a pointed question. Time and again I see art related to biotechnology which doesn’t ask intelligent, well-formulated questions. Perhaps it’s because I’m a biologist, but I don’t think a tossed salad of controversial ideas - IVF, evolution, extinction, selection, sex, religion - creates an effective debate in the mind of the viewer.
The gallery press release suggests that the pieces are united by the impact of human agency on evolution. But is that accurate? Given the rarity of IVF, it seems unlikely to alter human evolution. One of the reproduced passages describes selecting sperm in order to predispose the gender of the embryo one way or the other, and it’s true that egg donors are often chosen for superficial characteristics (we’ve all seen the ads in campus newspapers offering thousands of dollars for the ova of tall, blond, athletic overachievers). But IVF as currently practiced is by no means going to shift the human phenotypic norm towards blond overachievers. Even if you fear human reproduction might eventually reach a Gattaca-like state of draconian genetic selection, that’s a different scenario than last-ditch efforts to sustain endangered species. We’re not endangered; that’s not why we do IVF. And revitalized populations of zebras and lions would, ideally, show a minimal phenotypic stamp of our interference; that’s the point. We’re trying to counter genetic bottlenecks caused by our species - not caused by natural selection. Breeding dogs or horses to phenotypic extremes seems a more apt analogy for the Gattaca scenario. I could go on, but my point is that these are such complex and disparate issues, interleaving them seems artificially simplistic, and maybe a bit inflammatory.
I suppose one could argue that many gallery-goers never think about IVF or evolution or the ethics of selective breeding, so a show like this at least jars them into considering science in a new context. But is that good? Isn’t the linkage of IVF with a struggling pair of breeding zebras a strange linkage to plant? I certainly don’t expect art to be educational, easy, or explicit. . . so perhaps my expectations of this show are unfair. Comnick has the right to create whatever associations she wishes, and she owes no explanation to me. Yet as a scientist, I prefer shows that provoke the public to ask coherent questions - not leap to associations that may or may not be representative of the real science. And somehow I can’t go into a gallery and pretend I’m not a scientist. That may well be my failing, not Comnick’s.
Ah well. Funnily enough, the most disconcerting aspect of the entire show for me was the inclusion, among all the biological, sexual imagery, of boats. Sailing boats. Yes, I suppose they’re arks, and they’re tethered, and they’re paired - but come on! Although I have the utmost respect for the technical skills of the artist (how does one execute a drawing 100 inches tall without wrinkling the paper or smudging the charcoal?) I’d like a little less of it next time, please.
Digital artist Almacan (Kazuhiko Nakamura) creates intricately detailed surrealistic portraits, equal parts Giger and da Vinci. This one reminds me of an insectoid Green Man about to disperse into the undergrowth. . . and also, strangely, of Richard Dadd’s Bacchanalian Scene. Almacan says:
I am inspired by surrealism and cyberpunk styles of art. I find myself drawn to 19th century machine designs and armor among other things from that time period as motif. All of these images have been created with a portrait style while still containing a puzzle type quality.
I’m not the only one who liked Nicole Natri’s latest work. Check out the gallery poster for her solo show at Jr. Konsthallen, in Sweden, starting today. Congratulations, Nicole!
The Nov/Dec issue of Seed features an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer on science and art. It’s a short read, but it touches on most of the big issues at that intersection, primarily through the lens of neurobiology.
I haven’t read Jonah’s new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and I’m probably not going to get around to it for a while, if the half-dozen half-read books around my apartment are any indication (News flash: Machiavelli and Stephen Pinker are vying with John McPhee for the top of the heap)! I’m going to assume that the scanty arguments in the article are fleshed out further in the book, which is getting good reviews. But I have some quibbles.
The point of the article is solid: art can, and should, inform science, and both are necessary to answer “the deepest questions” of human experience. My first response was, well, duh. But I understand that to a lot of people, this isn’t necessarily intuitive. Science is so well-defined, and art is so, you know, fuzzy!
Jonah plays into that cliche:
. . . this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium.
I like “plunged straight into the pandemonium”: what a great description of the human mind in all its messy, noisy glory (that goes equally for an EEG, a whole-genome association study, or a Pollock). But what’s up with this anthropomorphizing of “science”? And later in the article: “Neuroscience, of course, believes it has no inherent limitations.” I don’t know; I haven’t spoken with Neuroscience lately - but I bet Jonah hasn’t either.
Neither science nor its moody teenage spawn neuroscience can want or believe anything - that’s just fuzzy language. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it’s also one way in which creationists and others denigrate science: by insinuating that science is an entity with an implicit, inextricable agenda to devalue the entire non-scientific realm (including both art and faith). Just as we have a responsibility to use the word “theory” carefully, because we know its weight, we must consistently distinguish the process of science from the agendas and prejudices of the flawed human beings who practice it.
I know no neuroscientists (say that three times fast) who claim neuroscience is without limitations. Personally, I believe human understanding in its entirety has fundamental, biological constraints - and at least for the foreseeable future, the practical power of neuroscience is thus constrained as well. Jonah asserts that art can extend our understanding past those constraints, through metaphor and analogy - a point I made myself in a short essay last spring, and one I fully agree with. Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant launching points for his science. But to me, art isn’t part of science. Art may help us decide where to point our scientific searchlight, but it’s just a first step - the intuition that sets the detective on the right path, not the evidence, and definitely not the crime lab.
That’s where I begin to disagree with the message of this article - I don’t think that art is necessary for the practice of good science. I think art complements science in the human experience, and inspires humans who do science. According to the article, “We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process. . . it’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method.” I think that’s a huge overstatement. I used to teach the scientific method, and I’m not sure where I’d put “art” in the flowchart. At the beginning, I suppose, as an inspiration for hypothesis formation - alongside other inspirations like nature, dreams, falling apples, or finding only one sock in the dryer. When it comes to informing science, is art really privileged over other aspects of the complex human experience?
When Jonah says, “the arts are an incredibly rich data set,” he’s absolutely right. And he’s right that artists discovered and exploited many of the basic principles of our visual systems:
As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
But if you “reverse-engineer” something, doesn’t that imply you understand its mechanism? To claim artists understand the visual system because they can harness its rules to good effect. . . that’s a big leap. Good cooks aren’t often able to explain chemistry, and athletes don’t necessarily understand either physics or physiology.
Even if art can be defined as a process of investigation, for the creator and the viewer, the discoveries it yields are inarticulate, unquantifiable, irreducible - that’s why we have art in the first place. Just try to get all the people in a gallery to agree on what they see in an abstract painting, much less why they feel about it as they do. Scientists like Zeki and Ramachandran study the effects artistic elements have on the brain, but they don’t embed their results in yet another piece of art.
In this essay, Jonah seems to argue that because art is irreducibly contradictory, like the human mind, art is therefore necessary to help science unpack the mind. I guess it’s the principle that “like dissolves like”? I’m not sure that’s what he really means to say; I think he was hobbled by the brevity of the assignment. But it was a nice read, and it did have a highly entertaining moment:
Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Plug “modern art” in for “modern physics”. The sentence works even better now! Ha. Expecting modern art, which most people don’t get in the first place, to make science more comprehensible is like . . . expecting a child’s balloon to steer a dirigible! (OK, I have no idea what that sentence means. I was trying to expand my limited understanding of reality through metaphor, and went fatally awry.)
So what place does art have in science? It enhances creativity. It helps us see things with new eyes - prompting us to ask new questions or resolve intractable problems. In the quantitatively inclined, it maintains a healthy left-brain/right-brain balance: most scientists I know are either artists or musicians (I may have a biased data set). And because art vaults right over jargon and equations, it’s the best tool we have for sharing complex scientific concepts with nonspecialists, or for “re-phrasing” what we know, so we can consider it from a new angle.
Consider this recent Nature Chemical Biology article by David Goodsell (Nov 2007), from which the lovely image at the top of the post is taken. Goodsell emphasizes the power of art as a scientific tool:
Pictures are powerful: they radically shape how we think about the subjects that we study. Think of Jane Richardson’s ribbon diagrams, and the way they have shaped our thinking about proteins. The clear and compelling nature of these ribbon diagrams spawned an entire discipline of folding classification and taxonomy. . .
The picture at the top of this post, with the orange spheres, depicts a current model of phagocytosis. It’s a sort of pictorial hypothesis that is incredibly helpful to focus thinking, but - obviously - it’s not true until the structures shown are verified. But is that so obvious? Goodsell’s article also makes the point that
Pictures can be dangerous as well. A clever artist can make even the most preposterous hypothesis seem familiar and plausible. This is doubly difficult with molecular imagery, given that so much of it is computer generated, based more or less on underlying experimental data. Completely believable images can be created for real molecular structures, as well as purely fictional constructs, and unless the sources are reported in the caption, it may be difficult to separate the real ones from the fakes.
Goodsell offers the following quiz: one of these three molecules is completely imaginary -a fictitious structure for a fictitious molecule. One is based on real structural data, for a real molecule. And one is a fictitious structure for a real molecule. Can you tell the difference?
Obvious? maybe not (I found this article via Biocurious, where the answer, and many guesses, are posted). #3, the DNA cube, is a fictitious structure - but a real (though synthetic) molecule; #1, a nanotube synthase, is the one that’s entirely made up. #2, the rotary motor, is the real structure.
Fiction is a perfectly valid component of art. But fiction in science - once it is known to be fiction - is abhorrent. Scientific/medical art is fascinating precisely because there is powerful tension between the scientific, didactic role of a specimen, supposed to be a purely accurate and objective representation of Nature, and the imaginative realm in which the artist casts it.
Just look at my last post on Delvaux, or indeed, most of the art I’ve discussed on this blog. Even in the simplest botanical print, or inventory of a wonder cabinet, the artist always “frames” the science - it can’t be helped! Choice of medium, choice of angle, choice of context - all of these are choices. The line between representation and story-telling is very fuzzy indeed, and the distinction is hardly science. But then, one shouldn’t expect it to be.
FYI: I couldn’t find the Seed article quoted here online. If you’re interested, it might be worth finding a copy of Seed in your local bookstore - that is, if you’re in a city. You know if YOUR bookstore carries this sort of thing. I couldn’t even find a copy of the New Yorker where I used to live, much less Seed: Science is Culture! If you can’t find a copy, consider subscribing: it’s worth it just for the design.
I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, “When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum,” by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it’s roundabout, so bear with me.
Dr. Hoffmann’s talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner’s traveling museum, the “Musee Spitzner”: a collection of anatomical models, moulages, specimens, paintings, dioramas, etc., that toured Europe for about a century before being dismantled circa WW2. Some of the Spitzner pieces ended up at the University of Paris, but unfortunately many others are now lost. The Spitzner’s centerpiece was a wax anatomical model of a sleeping woman, which opened to reveal her internal organs - much like the Anatomical Venus by Susini at La Specola, but simpler in execution. Unlike Susini’s model, however, the Spitzner Venus had a mechanical movement intended to emulate breath: her chest rose and fell as she lay there in her white nightgown. That’s a dramatic dissolution of the distinction between life, sleep, and death - and with its vivisectionist overtones, quite disturbing!
As if the breathing, sleeping Venus wasn’t interesting enough in her own right, the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, known for depicting languid naked (or nightgowned) women wandering the streets of Paris, was heavily influenced by the Spitzner collection (as mentioned in a recent post over at Morbid Anatomy). He encountered it at the Brussels Fair in 1932. Delvaux painted the Spitzner itself several times (The Musee Spitzner, 1943, below), but I didn’t realize until Professor Hoffmann’s talk how direct the connection is.
Compare Delvaux’ Sleeping Venus (1944) to Susini’s Anatomical Venus (the Spitzner’s wax Venus did not look exactly like this, but was probably close). Then compare The Musee Spitzner (as David Scott recommends in his book, Surrealizing the Nude) to Wiertz’ La Belle Rosina (1847):
The Sleeping Venus (1944)
Paul Delvaux
Anatomical Venus
Clemente Susini
Musee Spitzner (reproduction; original destroyed; 1943)
Paul Delvaux
La Belle Rosina (1847)
Antoine Wiertz
I always thought all these skeletons and somnambulant nudes were simply Delvaux’s bizarre imagination run amok. But it appears Delvaux was just as obsessed with, and influenced by, medical curiosities as we are today. (Life and death, you know - heavy stuff!)
In The Musee Spitzner this [juxtaposition of living structure and emblem of death] is achieved by the creation of a masterly confluence of related themes. First, there is the almost scientific interest Delvaux shows, like so many figurative painters, in the structure of the human body, both in its skeletal form and in its musculature (Delvaux had studied his Vesalius). The skinned male thus appears in The Musee Spitzner, as it appears the following year in another version of the Sleeping Venus, in which it stands before wall-charts illustrating various aspects of the male anatomy. (Surrealizing the Nude, David Scott; the ecorche, or skinned male specimen, Scott describes is in the back left of The Musee Spitzner, and unfortunately barely visible behind the seated woman in the image above.)
So how do we circle back to that Nicole Natri collage, Wounds, at the beginning of the post? Well, another fascinating thing Dr. Hoffmann shared about the Spitzner was that many of the wax surgical models, particularly the obstetrics models, were festooned with disembodied surgical hands! No arms, just cuffed wrists and hands, “operating” on the models. Yikes! I think I find this image more disturbing than the “breathing” wax Venus.
Most anatomical models I’ve seen are arranged cleanly, even elegantly, as if they had always been so - without blood or signs of surgery. A few obligingly hold their bodies open, or pose to show their innards to the viewer: fantasies that pleasantly veil the reality of death. (See my previous post on this topic for examples). But disembodied, foreign hands opening the body for the viewer evoke both the messy, unaesthetic surgery that is really required to reveal those inner structures, and the undeniable fact that, fantasy aside, the body itself is not in control of its own revealing. No matter how drowsy, ecstatic, or peaceful the Venuses look, they’re invaded - if only by our eyes. The hands make that invasion overt; the anonymity of the hands makes them universal. How many hands, over the years, have opened Susini’s Venus, and unfolded her organs? Is invasion the ominous force that permeates Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus - who lies oblivious, while her distraught doppelgangers wail?
Nicole’s piece captures my own disquiet perfectly. The disembodied hands and surgical implements are black-and-white, from another world than the technicolor body underneath them. Their intentions seem ambiguous. Are they clinical, or just curious? And what’s our excuse for looking, anyway?
Livet et al. 2007. Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature.
No, that’s not a winter scarf knitted from rainbow yarn. It’s a glowing mouse brain - the Brainbow paper is finally out! I was going to write this up, but the heck with it - just go read what Shelly wrote at Retrospectacle. She’s succinctly covered all the important points, with a nice science/art tie-in to boot.
She looked with angry woe at the straining and snarling horde below
“The Wooing of Becfola,” Irish Fairy Tales
Written by James Stephens, 1920
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham
The Woods: a stop-motion music video for Polly Paulusma, by artist Rima Staines. You can read Rima’s account of her creative process here, at her blog. Paulusma’s song is a sort of bittersweet version of the Hansel and Gretel myth.
What I really want to know is, why is MTV Italy willing to air this kind of magical semi-hallucination, when our MTV churns out nothing but reality shows? Grrr.
The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch
Written by S.J.A. Fitz-Gerald, 1896
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham
Maude and Willie felt themselves dropping, dropping, dropping, until the Zankiwank bounced up and caught them both in his arms, saying as he rushed forward:- “Quick, the gates are only open for five seconds once a week, and if we don’t get inside at once we shall be jammed in the door-way.”
So into Shadow Land they tumbled as the porter mumbled and grumbled and shut the gate with a boom and a bang after them.
A truly altruistic, wonderful person at conceptart has posted links to several dozen vintage art books, mostly hosted through archive.org. The list includes instructional books by Bridgman, Ruskin, etc., children’s books illustrated by NC Wyeth, Pyle, etc., and a large selection of delicious work by Arthur Rackham. Come on - who knew Rackham illustrated something as bizarre as “The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch”?
I’ve been running across an unusually large number of things I covet lately, and it occurred to me that if you are reading my blog, you (or your friends/family) might have similar tastes. So I thought I’d post a list of gift ideas for those of you who are starting to look. I am NOT getting commissions, I promise.
First, with GREAT fanfare: Peacay/PK at BibliOdyssey has accomplished what I’d have judged impossible: a book! My mind boggles at the copyright implications. . . it must have been an incredible pain to track down book rights to the images, but what a treasure (and how fitting for the images to go full circle, from old books, to a blog, back to paper). BibliOdyssey - the Book: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet
The Undercover Brain Bag by Jun Takahashi: a purse with sulci and gyri. It’s like doing a callosotomy every time you get your wallet out! I found this via Virginia Hughes. Before you get your hopes up, apparently there’s only one of these bags, and I can’t figure out how much it is or how exactly to buy it! Maybe that’s the point: unless your brain is that big, you can’t have it. At (I think) Someday Store.
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Now this is the best. I hope you already know that for Christmas you can give your loved one gonorrhea, herpes, or even Ebola. And they’re so CUTE! Think Geek: Giant Plush Microbes
No explanation why they have a neuron in the list with all the contagions, but I’d like one of those, too.
I know I keep plugging Raven Hanna’s neurotransmitter jewelry, but she just told me her long-awaited endorphin choker has been revealed publicly. This gem is the entire sequence of beta-endorphin. This is the gift for the lady geek who already has everything else - and given the time that goes into one necklace, you will want to order NOW!
Myself, I’m still eyeing Raven’s neurotransmitter charm bracelets. Who knows, it might help with what my boss referred to last week as “your very apparent GABA imbalance.”
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Not everyone knows their endorphin from their estrogen, and non-scientists need gifts too. For non-molecular jewelry, visit my friend Ophelia’s etsy shop (Ophelia herself IS a scientist). I get compliments every time I wear her work - it happened again today - and you know no one else will have the same piece, which is especially nice for me since I and all my friends shop at Ann Taylor, and unfortunately have the same clothes. Ophelia’s Jewels
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The “Science: It Works, Bitches” T-shirt. I have almost bought this like, five times. What is stopping me??? Oh yeah - I’m broke. Blame Ann Taylor. the xkcd.com store: t-shirts
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The “viva la evolution” t-shirt. Che Guevara’s Jurassic doppleganger: what more could you want?? Trilobite clothing
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Pretty things from Walteria Living and emily amey here, and here.
