While other mothers use their baby’s nap time to catch up on house chores or get some shuteye themselves, 41-year-old Mami Koide likes to turn her sleeping daughter Nuno into a living, breathing work of art.

When the sun sets over Tokyo, and it’s time for baby Nuno to go to bed, her mother, cartoonist Mami Koide, gets ready for work. After making sure the toddler is sound asleep she sets her on a canvas improvised from two mattresses covered with a fluffy blanket and makes her the protagonist in various artistic installations. The creative mother uses everyday items like clothes, socks and even vegetables to create fantastic sceneries around Nuno, who is always the center star. Once everything is in place, she climbs onto a chair and takes a bird’s eye photo of the artwork. Koide created he first art piece to send to her husband, who works as a bartender and is away from home during the night, but as the ritual continued, she put together a collection of around 200 images, which eventually became an illustrated book, and a best seller on Amazon Japan just a week after it was released.

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Danish artist Nina Maria Kleivan replaced her new-born daughter’s baby clothes with uniforms of known dictators .

No, Ms. Kleivan is not a fan of dictatorship, she just used this opportunity to show that evil is present in all of us, no matter how innocent we may look. The idea for this unusual art project came to Nina after she suffered some complications from her pregnancy,and was forced to spend some time at home.

Away from her art studio, the artist chose her young daughter, Faustina, as a canvas. Looking at her, Nina started contemplating on the idea that each human being starts with a clean slate and has the opportunity to do good or bad, in life. “Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist. The possibility is still there,” she says.

Like the Childzilla series, Potency may be comical, but it’s meant to have people ponder on where evil comes from. Read More »