Life force of nature

My work strives to illustrate the bond between Mother Nature and human beings. Primarily, I seek the harmony created by balanced compositions of natural and man-made objects. Any accidental visual conflict arising from this pairing is also a subject matter I find myself exploring within the execution my pieces. In our high-speed daily lives, we often find ourselves unsettlingly disconnected from nature. Stephen Harrod Buhner describes this feeling as a loss of connection to plants, to the land, to Earth, [that] leaves the holes with which we are naturally born unfilled, and proposes that the solution is reconnection to the natural world and the living intelligence of the land (231). According to him, humans all possess vacancies that are only filled by the living things that have evolved on the earth with us for a million years. I seek to create an answer to this dilemma with my art, creating work that draws from the refreshing vitality of nature. Reflecting the principles in Taoism, a philosophy of harmonious human life with nature, Mother Nature proves to be an abundant inspirational resource for the creation of art. Certainly, humans\u27 appreciation of nature and its sublimity has been expressed in many different forms of art throughout the ages. It is not my goal, however, to simply mimic the outside visual features of nature. Paul Klee said, Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible (Chipp 182). Through the human element that is my thoughts and experiences, I seek to transform the superficial features of nature to an expression of its inner values. I find the plants growing in urban settings to be some of the most intriguing objects. In the artificial surroundings of busy cities, I observe the struggle of plants as they attempt to survive and sustain their lives amidst the chaos. Despite the often squalid conditions, the plants successful growth speaks to a strong life force that rivals their counterparts growing in the pristine wilderness. Through the exploration of various media: silver, cotton, fishing line, steel, copper, concrete, plastic, and ceramic, I attempt to illustrate this contrast of nature and the industrialized world. In this thesis, I intend to reveal the inspiration derived from nature, and how these influences and motivations are manifested in the execution of my artwork. Adopting the vitality of nature as a major motif, my jewelry and sculptural pieces serve to express this idea in a tangible form. As an infinite aspect of life, I am convinced that the unlimited energy and vitality of nature could remain a solid foundation for my continuous working process

Toward a genealogy of modernism: Herder, Nietzsche, history

The full text is available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/13050

Toward a genealogy of modernism: Herder, Nietzsche, history

A positive definite quadratic form is called perfect, if it is uniquely determined by its arithmetical minimum and the integral vectors attaining it. In this self-contained survey we explain how to enumerate perfect forms in $d$ variables up to arithmetical equivalence and scaling. We put an emphasis on practical issues concerning computer assisted enumerations. For the necessary theory of Voronoi we provide complete proofs based on Ryshkov polyhedra. This allows a very natural generalization to $T$-perfect forms, which are perfect with respect to a linear subspace $T$ in the space of quadratic forms. Important examples include Gaussian, Eisenstein and Hurwitz quaternionic perfect forms, for which we present new classification results in dimensions $8,10$ and 12.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Quadratic Forms, Chile 2007, published in the AMS Contemporary Mathematics serie

Colour Enchanted: The Use of Colour in Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden

The precise category to which colour belongs is an elusive field of study, that which has worried philosophers, writers and scientists across the ages. Is it an intrinsic quality of objects, like size and shape? Or is it an illusion, purely subjective, and borne of visual experiences

Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today

Curtis\u27s botanical magazine.

v.79=ser.3:v.9 (1853) [no.4689-4757

A Flower-Piece and Napoleon

"Among the most appreciated Dutch genre paintings are flower-pieces. In 1964 the Museum of Art and Archaeology became the recipient of a flower-piece signed by the illustrious early eighteenth-century flower-painter Jan van Huysum."--First paragraph.Includes bibliographical reference

Integrated pest management of major pests and diseases in eastern Europe and the Caucasus

This book promotes Integrated Pest Management, to contribute to reduced reliance on pesticides and the avoidance of adverse impacts from pesticide use on the health and safety of farming communities, consumers and the environment. Through the IPM approach, technical advice is provided to help plan methods and measures to control major pests and diseases occurring or expected to occur in the countries of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. The specific descriptions contain a short summary of the biology of the species, completed with information on methods and tools of monitoring and control. Preventive control methods are also discussed