This Man's Salt Art Will Leave You Thirsty for More
From Nation, For Nation - Pulse of the Nation
Let's Hang Out With Terrible Tommy at the Gallows
Suzanne Proulx Makes Real Dust Bunnies
New Meaning to Spring Cleaning
A necessary part of cleaning up is throwing trash away. After you’re done sweeping and dusting, everything collected in the dust pan gets tossed in the trash bag and discarded.
Unless you are an artist.
For some artists, this means collecting your dog’s hair after a grooming, but for Suzanne Proulx, it just means keeping all that dust for something special.
Dust Bunnies
Proulx was commissioned by Febreze Air Purifiers to make bunny sculptures out of 40 pounds of dust. Lucky for her, she wasn’t expected to collect the dust from her own home. 40 pounds wasn’t an arbitrary number; the average American household produces that much dust in a year.
To collect all 40 pounds, Proulx relied on donations from friends, family, and strangers. Students at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches, also helped out by giving her the lint from the dorm dryers.
To make the bunnies, she had to build a skeleton frame, cover it in wire mesh shaped like a rabbit head, stuff the mesh with lint, and spray it all with an adhesive.
What started out as a statement from Febreze, turned into some really unique art. But if it seems as though they chose Proulx on a whim, that is not the case.
Suzanne Proulx
Proulx has dealt with dust before. She made a few portraits out of dust that caught people’s attention. Like so many other artists, she wanted to make a point about something fleeting and temporary.
“They are depictions of our bodies created from our actual shed bodies, trying to make permanent what is temporary and cast off.”
Dust isn’t the only medium she works in. She also takes household objects and transforms them into sculptures. Fruit becomes birds hatching from eggs, and potatoes and lemons become body parts.
Proulx’s art has always branched into the odd, but the bunnies are certainly the cutest.
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From Globe, For Globe - Pulse of the Planet
Learn about one of the largest religious monuments ever constructed.
Making History
Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat, which means “temple city,” is spread throughout 500 acres, making it one of the largest religious monuments ever constructed. An astounding 50 percent of international tourists visit Cambodia just to see this religious monument.
Angkor Wat is featured on Cambodia’s national flag. The only other flag to feature a national monument is Afghanistan’s.
Angkor Wat was built by King Suryavarman II between 1113 and 1150 AD as a Hindu temple site dedicated to the god Vishnu, but it was later converted into a Buddhist temple site in the 14th century.
Fast Facts:
According to inscriptions on the temple, the construction of Angkor Wat involved 300,000 workers and 6,000 elephants-and it still wasn’t fully completed!
Each structure was built using Khmer sandstone blocks that were bonded together almost invisibly with a vegetable compound instead of mortar.
Unlike other temples that face east, Angkor aligns to the west—a direction typically associated with death in Hindu culture.
The Angkor temple Ta Prohm-famous for the large vines covering the ruins-was used as the set for the Hollywood blockbuster Tomb Raider. It is now commonly known as the “Tomb Raider temple” and the “Angelina Jolie temple.”
Hidden Wonders
Over 200 hidden paintings have been discovered in the 213-foot-tall central tower using technology NASA developed for use on the Mars rovers, which revealed centuries-old murals of elephants, deities, boats, orchestral ensembles, and people riding horses-all invisible to the naked eye!
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