A Parasitic Craft: Taxidermy in the Art of Tessa Farmer

This essay focuses on the installation Little Savages by artist Tessa Farmer, exhibited at the Natural History Museum, London, in 2007. A taxidermied fox, other natural materials, and tiny malevolent fairies made by the artist out of insect and plant material, create narratives concerning ecology. The materials used by Farmer lead us to reflect upon the history of taxidermy, its impact on fashion and its position as a domestic handicraft. Farmer, a vegetarian, is using references to taxidermy, fairies, and social insects in order to question the authority of the institution in which she is exhibiting. She is not creating a nostalgic vision of craft. Instead, her work represents an alliance between handicraft and recent technologies in the age of the Internet. Natural materials and electronic mass media are interrelated in Farmer's work, driven by curiosity about the material at hand, be it tangible or ephemeral. The audience is reminded that neither materials nor nature can be frozen and preserved for eternity, but instead are subject to processes of decay, death, and evolution.