Saturday, October 1, 2011

The Skeleton Fairies of Tessa Farmer

In theory, I plan on October being a sort of morbid/creepy fairy tale month, in honor of Halloween. I may run out of creepy things and find lots of cutesy things instead so we'll see, but to start off, these images of fairies by Tessa Farmer that are definitely not the fairies we're used to seeing.

From her website:
"Tessa's miniscule sculptures reinvigorate a belief in fairies: not the sweet Tinkerbell image in popular conscience, but a biological, entomological, macabre species translating pastoral fable into nightmarish lore. Constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, each of Tessa's figures stand barely 1 cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass.

Hovering with rarefied, jewel-like beauty, Tessa's tiny spectacles resound with a theurgist exotica: their specimen forms borrow from Victorian occultism to evolve as something alien and futuristic. Playing out apocalyptic narratives of a microscopic underworld, Tessa's manikin wonders rule with baneful fervour: harnessing mayflies, battling honey bees, attacking spindly spiders. Presented as wee preternatural discoveries, Tessa's sculptures conjure a superstitious premise, dismantling the mythos of fantasia with evidence of something much more gothic, sinister, and bewitching."










More images can be viewed here.

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