Chicken wire doesn’t exactly bring awe and inspiration to mind. It’s cheap, pointy, a little hard to shape, and it’s generally used to keep chickens from making a mess everywhere. It’s more like a really tiny wired fence than anything else. London-based artist Benedetta Ubaldini, however, turns these scraps of metal into something truly fantastic. Ubaldini is a sculptor like no other. While we’re used to sculptures carved from the heaviest, most solid materials, she sculpts from simple material we see every day.

 

 

Her sculptures are a great contrast to what our expectations are. What Benedetta Ubaldini creates is not solid and immovable, but light and airy. She creates dream-like scenes with her sculptures that feel like they can float off at any moment. Colorful and airy clouds and animals seem to appear from nothingness, or straight out of a story book. Each scene is very purposefully composed. Of her medium, the artist states: "The simplicity of this material contains the magical power of transparency that is capable of giving each piece the lightness of an apparition, a ghostlike quality, like a trace from a memory." Truly to her words, characters float in and out of her scenes like mysterious ghosts.

It is a well-known fact that chicken wire is often used only to create structure in some art pieces. It is simple, skeletal, and seldom meant to be seen. Benedetta Ubaldini makes this skeleton the star of her scenes, fleshing them out by shaping them into something wonderful, not covering them. Her work is fantastic, and she doesn’t just work with chicken wire! The artist has also done some really funky “ugly art” using balloons!

 

 

Check out a ton of wonderful pieces on the artist’s website, here!

 

[Via The Science of Design ]