Built throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the Aylesbury Estate is an enormous public housing complex in South East London that at its peak, boasted 11,000 residents. Like other social projects of this kind, Aylesbury has struggled with violence and vandalism throughout its run, and in 2005, local officials decided to demolish the estate and rebuild in phases rather than rehabilitate the existing structures.

Living and working in South East London for nearly four decades, Harriet Mena Hill was familiar with the area, but it wasn’t until 2018 when she was commissioned to teach a summer program for young residents that she really engaged with the project. She made large portraits from wool, blending dyed roving to delineate windows, shape bowed electrical wires, and even mimic graffiti spray-painted on outdoor walls.

Forming the series Soft Concrete, the textile pieces cast a largely gray environment of stone and steel in soft fiber. The body of work, Hill says, was a “repositioning of how the estate is perceived. Historically, it has been widely portrayed in the media as violent and intimidating, as a place without hope.”

In contrast, Soft Concrete “presents the estate as a place of living and community. From a distance, the portraits look like photographs or realistic paintings, but on closer inspection, the material reveals itself to be wool, hand blended for subtle colour mixing used to depict small active details of domestic life,” the artist adds.

Hill is broadly interested in the ways that communities and the objects they interact with can become vessels for shared memories, so when the estate began to be razed in 2020, she started to collect fragments of concrete from the construction site. “It was a direct response to the situation of residents who were required to stay at home as the demolition of adjoining blocks, the homes of their former neighbours, continued throughout lockdown, in spite of wider restrictions,” she tells Colossal.

Before its destruction, several tenants had advocated for renovations rather than demolition, hoping to preserve the community and homes they’d built. In an interview with the BBC in 2023, long-time resident Aysen Dennis lamented being forced to leave the estate after 30 years. Local administrators found her new housing in central London, but it wasn’t the same. “The council gave me everything I asked for. It’s on a high floor. There’s lots of light. I can see the park,” Dennis said. “But it’s not my home.”

Intimate in scale, Hill’s paintings glimpse hallways and pockets of windows that are similarly sliced from their larger contexts, the ragged edges of concrete framing the largely domestic spaces. Part of the ongoing series titled The Aylesbury Fragments, the scenes capture the run-down infrastructure of buildings left standing during the phased reconstruction process.

Although regeneration began in 2013, it’s less than half complete, and Hill has completed more than 150 paintings to date. As demolition continues, she adds to her ever-changing collection of concrete remnants. “I live with the unpainted pieces for months, sometimes years, getting to know their shape before I begin working on them,” the artist says, noting that as long as there are buildings still under construction, she’ll continue painting these small tributes to the community once housed within their walls.

Hill has exhibitions slated for London and across the U.K. throughout 2027. Follow along on Instagram.

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Like the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, the first time I found myself in front of a painting by the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), I was stunned. Who was this elegant owl-figure with dainty fingers and feet? What was animating the creaturely machine at her side with tentacle-like brushes as hands? And, would I ever be able to look away?

Feeling mesmerized and awe-struck by Varo’s Surrealist visions isn’t an uncommon position to find oneself in. A new release from Louisiana Channel interviews three artists and two writers—Schweblin being one—about Varo’s influence, particularly her precise approach to alchemy and visualizing the thin veil between the physical and spiritual world. Interspersing artworks and commentary creates an insightful tapestry of a singular artist and her enduring legacy. Watch “Remedios Varo: The Painter of Magic” below, and learn more about the artist previously on Colossal.

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“I try to avoid playing it safe or going for the obvious. Instead, I look at plants from a different perspective and express them in my own way,” South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeon says about a fantastical series of illustrations. “Ironically, having rules is what gives me the freedom to experiment with plant shape.”

Although she’s trained as a printmaker and continues to build compositions in layers, Jeon turns to digital methods as she reimagines the specimens cohabitating in her apartment, beginning with leaves and stems before venturing into surreal terrain. Purple veins, red outlines, and a smattering of stars appear on the imagined life forms, their vivid color palettes furthering their sense of the uncanny.

Titled Plant Series, the project “started as a personal challenge to fill a square canvas with plants, playing with shapes and composition to pack everything in as much as possible,” she says. “As the series continues, the drawings evolve and the nuances shift, but at its heart, it is always about composition, balance, colour, and shape—and hopefully sending out positive vibes, too.”

Dozens of illustrations from the series are compiled in Folium, Jeon’s first monograph from Volume. The publisher functions like Kickstarter and asks readers to back the project before printing. You can reserve your copy on Volume’s website, and find more from the artist on Instagram.

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Delicate waves, mysterious fissures, and diffused lightning set some of the scenes in Sarah Lee’s dreamy landscape paintings. Moons with strangely direct beams of light and supple mountains cradled by lakes and forests are tinged with magical realism. Most of the works seen here are part of Lee’s current solo exhibition titled Deeper at Albertz Benda, in which the artist highlights different ecosystems and the nature of clarity and concealment. She often titles her works in reference to the colors she employs, such as “Emerald Sky” and “Red Meadow in Mist.”

These apparently “empty” landscapes nod to the romantic Western tradition of seascapes and broad, open expanses that pandered to a problematic colonialist mindset, such as that of Manifest Destiny. John O’Sullivan, who coined the term, wrote that Americans possessed the fundamental right to “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us…” In Lee’s oil paintings, a gallery statement says, “the landscape pushes back.”

In the misty, fuzzy edges of glaciers, glowing skies, and mountain peaks, the artist imbues a nuanced sense of the uncanny. “There is a distinct feeling that more is hidden in the scene than what meets the eye: in the recesses of the water, underneath the ice, obscured by an outcropping of coral,” the gallery says. The light perhaps shines a little too brightly or a gap opens up ominously in a field of ice. “Before Dark” draws our attention to the serene surface of a lake, and what we can see is beautiful, yet one wonders if we’re witnessing the calm before the storm.

Lee harnesses the power of the unknown, examining the way nature both nourishes us and is the ultimate authority. Humans need clean water, food, and fresh air, and we rely on these things even as our collective actions cause the environment harm along with, paradoxically, ourselves. The artist’s paintings provide a kind of filter through which to see this contradiction, as the land and water are elements we fundamentally rely on but cannot control.

Deeper continues through October 10 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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In tender paper collages featuring woodland creatures in relief, Kanako Abe imagines dreamlike scenes reminiscent of childhood narratives and folk tales. Giant wolves, diminutive bunnies, and curious deer wander through a Narnia-like realm that we glimpse through foliage-filled portals. In her practice, “the paper becomes a canvas for stories untold, where every cut is a deliberate step into a world where imagination and reality intertwine,” a statement says.

Paper-cutting has long been a central tenet of Abe’s practice, which she recently applied to an ambitious forthcoming book project in collaboration with young adult novelist Caryl Lewis. The Paper Girl, published by Frances Lincoln Ltd., follows the adventures of a young protagonist who folds herself into different forms in response to others’ comments and directives only to learn how to stand up for herself by summoning the power of “no.”

The Paper Girl is slated for release on October 6. Pre-order your copy on Bookshop, and if you provide proof of purchase via a form on Quarto, you’ll receive a signed bookplate by Abe. The artist is currently working toward a curatorial endeavor at Giant Robot Gallery scheduled to open in January, which will also include her work. And next April, she’ll participate in a group exhibition at Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia, Washington. Keep an eye on updates on Instagram.

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“Do you ever think about concrete?” opens the trailer for The History of Concrete, a documentary released in select theaters in the U.S. last Friday. If your answer is no, the quirky new feature by filmmaker John Wilson may mean you can’t get it out of your head.

Wilson is known for the cult-favorite, comedic HBO docuseries How To with John Wilson, which he described as being “kind of like that show Planet Earth, except if it was only in New York and David Attenborough was forced to film everything himself.” His movie debut is primed for absurdity, delving into something that’s immanently mundane yet fundamental to the way we live.

The film captures concrete’s ubiquity in urban sidewalks, buildings, and homes, not to mention the eccentric ways it appears on the streets and in the industries that have grown up around it. To most of us, it’s a kind of infrastructural building block, but through Wilson’s lens, it’s an unlikely medium through which to understand New York and its denizens.

See more on the movie’s website.

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In the winning video of Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition, Dr. Ning Xu captures the abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD)—a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. “When people watch cilia beating, they immediately understand that something beautiful and important is happening inside us,” says the Beijing-based researcher. “I think this competition turns microscopy into a shared language.”

The marvelous sight is just one of the notable videos from the annual competition, which just celebrated its 16th cycle. This year’s panel welcomed esteemed scientists, researchers, and science communicators who evaluated more than 340 video entries from 40 different countries. Watch more winning videos on the contest’s website and stay posted for winners of the Nikon Small World photo competition, which will be announced on October 21.

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Vibrant, amorphous shapes intersect with squiggles and occasional geometric lettering in the murals of Chicago-based artist Emmy Star Brown. She describes her studio practice as a space where her inner child emerges, paring down her expressions to formal qualities of line, shape, and contrast. In her large-scale installations on urban buildings, which draw on her background in visual communications and advertising, both interior and exterior surfaces transform into energetic, edge-to-edge romps of color.

Brown’s work is currently on view alongside that of Danym Kwon in The Peace of Wild Things at Joy Machine. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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It’s all things avian at Bird Photographer of the Year, the world’s largest contest dedicated to images of feathered creatures planet-wide. This year, the program welcomed more than 24,000 entries from photographers around the globe, capturing diving penguins, urban denizens, mating rituals, dramatic flights, and more.

Highlighting birds of all kinds, the competition emphasizes the diverse appearances and behaviors of the animals and also raises awareness of the challenges they face due human-triggered habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and other factors. Categories include Best Portrait, Bird Behavior, Conservation, Urban Birds, and others, plus three youth categories for budding photographers aged 17 years and younger.

Top prize in this year’s edition went to Henley Spiers’ underwater image of a diving northern gannet captured off the Shetland Islands, about 110 miles north of mainland Scotland. These large seabirds, which nest on steep cliffs and rocks, are a common sight around the northern nation, which is home to around 40 percent of the world’s population. Unfortunately, some of the massive colonies suffered severe losses due to bird flu, an outbreak that may take 15 years to recover from.

Spiers captures the gannet from beneath the water’s surface as it aims for a meal. He says, “When fish are spotted, the gannets fly into the wind and stretch out their wings as brakes, precisely adjusting their position in relation to their quarry. Moments later, with wings tucked in tightly, the gannet shape-shifts into a pointed torpedo, diving into the water at speeds of up to 86km/h.” That’s more than 50 miles per hour.

See all of the winners on the Bird Photographer of the Year website, and follow updates on Instagram.

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In our era of digital screens and virtually endless images and videos, it’s a challenge to imagine the time before photography existed. Two centuries ago this year, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce successfully captured the first known permanent image. He called his new process héliographie, or “sun writing,” employing light-sensitive bitumen dissolved in lavender oil, which he used to coat a polished pewter plate.

After exposing the plate on his windowsill for several hours, an image of several outbuildings on Niépce’s property emerged, and photography as we know it was born. But it wasn’t until 1839, when Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced his eponymous Daguerrotype, that photography entered the public realm. From there, variations in the chemistry and materials proliferated around the world, spurring advanced technologies and the phenomenon we continue to enjoy today, even in a digital form that feels worlds away from the first iterations.

Celebrating 200 years of photography in France, GrandPalaisRmn has organized a series of 11 themed, traveling exhibitions as part of the ambitious initiative titled Grand Angle. From 19th-century studio portraits and dance to rural life and the front lines of war, the shows highlight a wide range of subject matter and individuals behind the lens. The selections are drawn primarily from the vast archives of the GrandPalaisRmn and Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP), which steward some 1.8 million digitized images altogether.

The shows are also coordinated in partnership with Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and Fisheye, and they’re staged both around France and internationally. Ruralités, for example, just opened at the tourism office of Roubion, a small commune in southeastern France. And a solo exhibition of work by the late Willy Ronis is on view this month at the Châtel-Saint-Germain library. The program is slated to continue through September 2027.

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