London-based artist and Oxford graduate Tessa Farmer was born in 1978 in Birmingham, and has became popular due to her usage of natural materials such as chitin, bones, moose, furs, plants and roots in her work.
Using these materials, she creates breathtaking sculptures and still lives, often presenting the decay of seemingly still-alive animals.
For this, she dissects cadavers that she or an acquaintance has found. The scenes are so vivid, it looks as if the process of decaying is happening right before our very eyes – and once, this actually happened for real! She hid eggs in one of her works, and when the grubs came out, they started to eat the dead bird that was one of the main elements of the sculpture. Art in motion, indeed!
Apart from that, she usually freezes the insects before making them a part of her art. She was previously an assistant to an entomologist, and this position was where her love for insects shone through. Her favorite species? Parasitic wasps. They lay their eggs inside of caterpillars, and the caterpillars then serve as a food source for the wasp grubs…
The most important part of her sculptures, however, revolves around fairies, which Tessa makes out of bones and chitin. And I don’t mean the happy flitting fairies from the chipper fairytales of yore. These are evil fairies, which kill the animals and make tools and other things out of them. These are fairies that eat meat and instill terror into others. Insects, cadavers and fairies – what an artistic symbiosis!
