What art school does teach you is how to teach yourself. No one is going to ask you to do art projects. It’s your freedom. And freedom is the condition of responsibility. You learn how to take responsibility for your time and choices.

—artist Jumana Manna in Acne Paper

Japanese-born artist Etsuko Ichikawa creates large-scale pieces of work with a molten fire. “Handling it while aglow at 2100°F, she loops, stretches and presses the smoking mass of lava atop paper to create abstract drawings known as pyrographs,” says the Anthropologist (where you can see a cool short film of Ichikawa in action). “My work is a continuing investigation of what lies between the ephemeral and the eternal. Moment and memory, absorption and evaporation, light and shadow are some of the triggers that inspire me and relate to my work,” says Ichikawa. “My ‘glass pyrographs’ are made by drawing hot molten glass, which is one way to capture and eternalize the immediacy of a moment, while my floating installations and time-based work are about ever-changing states of mind.”

Andy Ellison, an MRI technologist at Boston University Medical School, began scanning fruits and veggies in his lab as a way to warm up the machines. The results were so beautiful that he started a blog,  Inside Insides, to share the mesmerizing moving images of everything from sliced starfruit (above) to onions.