Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt Gallery | reviews, news & interviews
Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt Gallery
Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt Gallery
This Saatchi favourite makes art that’s scarily fun but still has gravitas
Saturday, 28 May 2011
In Tessa Farmer’s world a mummified cat can become an entertainment complex for fairies and bugs
The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive.
The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive.
‘One’s first queasy thought is of the operating table, but as always with Farmer’s work, your response changes as you move in closer’
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