When 55-year-old Lorina Bulwer was placed in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse in 1893, she embroidered protests into long pieces of patchwork fabric, ranting in unpunctuated capitals:

THE CHATTER IS I MISS LORINA BULWER CAMBS WOMAN DROVE TO THRIGBY HALL NORFOLK E. BULWER MARRIED AN HEMAPHRODITE EUNICH I MISS LORINA BULWER WAS EXAMINED BY DR PINCHING OF WALTHAMSTOW ESSEX AND FOUND TO BE A PROPERLY SHAPED WOMAN …

Much of the invective is directed against E Bulwer and Queen Victoria, apparently trying to connect Bulwer’s family to prominent families of the time and possibly referring to sexual abuse in a scandal of 1859. But her reasons for making the samplers aren’t entirely understood.

Ruth Burwood, adult learning officer for Norwich Museums, told the Eastern Daily Press, “In very basic terms there isn’t anything like them in the world, they’re just absolutely extraordinary; the fact she was a woman in a lunatic ward in Great Yarmouth workhouse and was somehow able to produce these embroideries. Workhouse inmates did do sewing but this is almost like she’s been allowed to do this as therapy.”

The Cook, a reversible portrait by Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, circa 1570.

Arcimboldo made a whole series of such paintings.

Italian artist Salvatore Garau has auctioned an invisible sculpture titled Io Sono (“I am”) for 15,000 euros. The buyer receives a certificate of authentication and agrees to display the nonexistent artwork in a private home in an unobstructed area 5 feet square.

Last month the artist displayed another immaterial sculpture, Buddha in Contemplation, near the entrance to the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan. The area of its location was marked off with tape.

Garau said that the titles of his works “activate” viewers’ imagination. “When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms. After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?”

(Thanks, Sharon.)

Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan writes music of densely sophisticated rhythmic complexity, arranging subdivisions of grouped tuplets over a ground pulse that’s sometimes withheld, leading the ear into assumptions that are later revealed to be mistaken. Below, composer David Bruce analyzes some of his work.