Love This! Creating With Cast Shadows

Okay, so I know I say this often, but really--today you're going to be blown away. As you can see from the image above, 12.12.12's featured artist, Kumi Yamashita, is absolutely incredible. She was born in Japan but now lives and works in NYC (of course), and her primary "medium" is creating works of art by using light and shadow to project an image onto a wall. She uses found materials (as in the piece above) and/or carved pieces of wood or metal (as in some of the pieces below) to create an object that when lit from a particular angle, projects the profile or outline of a person. It's mind-boggling and honestly, it's very hard to conceptualize that there isn't a person in the room who is casting the shadow in each piece...

To fully grasp what she is doing, you simply have to take a look at her work. You can check out some of my favorites, below:

Ideal viewpoint.

From the side, so you can see the process...

Lit from below.

Lit from above.

Detail of one of the pieces from above.

Each face is slightly different!

I know!?!?!  So. Cool. Makes the typical hand/shadow puppet characters seem pretty lame in comparison...

You can learn more about Kumi Yamashita and view more of her incredible work on her website, here. 

I hope that you, too, can find beauty in the cast shadows of life today :)

Namaste!
Mary Catherine