Arts: Tessa Farmer

At first glance Tessa Farmer’s installation Control Over Nature, on view in the crypt of St Pancras Church in London from late May, looks little more than some organic detritus: a swarm of insects hovering in the air, the badly decomposing body of a cat, three dead birds, and a pile of bones. However, closer inspection reveals the diorama to be a pulsating world just out of view, as rich in disturbing detail as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or a piece by Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Farmer, a fine artist who is also currently on display at the Saatchi Gallery, has spent the last eight years creating 10mm tall “fairies” out of plant material, soil and flies wings. Here, her fairies battle hornets, construct airships out of sheep skulls and make home in the mummified cat. Inside the corpse, the humanoid figures wrestle with real ants and farm fly pupae and wasps.

The morbid but beautiful work was made as a direct response to Amon Tobin’s eighth album, ISAM. For four years, the Brazilian-born electronic composer has been devising ever more fiendish means of sound manipulation and, most notably, he has designed and built all of his samples into playable instruments. Speaking about the similarities between their projects, he says: “We are both using familiar materials and reorganising them into unfamiliar structures. Tessa will take the head of an animal and turn it into a vehicle for battling fairies; I’ll take the sound of my chair creaking and turn it into a playable instrument.”

Control Over Nature, May 26 — June 5, cryptgallery.org.uk

Original artwork by Tessa Farmer, courtesy of Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art. Art direction by Oscar & Ewan.

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