Tessa Farmer : The Terror (detail), 2006
Hell's Fairies: Tessa Farmer's Work by Stephen Feeke, 2006
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs. Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. In her work, however, Tessa Farmer subverts the dominant position we have assumed. She makes skeletal, winged fairies arranged in highly complex airborne tableaux. These fairies ape the worst of our behaviour and they themselves torture defenceless birds, animals and insects. Nothing like Tinkerbell or Mustardseed, Farmer's fairies are evil and they do terrible things.
At fist glance, the fairies look similar to insects. However, on closer inspection we see grimacing skulls on top of tiny emaciated frames as if they are the result of a genetic modification gone wrong. Only millimetres tall, the detail - down to their miniscule fingers and toes - is extraordinary. Using plant roots, wasp wings and glue, Farmer is highly skilled at making such minute bodies. This interest in anatomy began at art school, when she decided to make sense of the human body by building an under life-sized skeleton from the branches of a tree. This led her to her working on a smaller and smaller scale, testing her own abilities and the capacity of her media, until the present monsters were born. Farmer has also made an entire miniature world for the fairies to inhabit, using all manner of found insect parts, animal bones and taxidermy birds bought from eBay.
The resultant works are fascinating for their beauty and horror. Arranged in their countless numbers, it is hard to take in all the fairy action at once. The eye darts from one violent scene to another. Like a colony of termites, the works show a sophisticated social world which is also barbaric. The fairies have taken over and Farmer gives them horrible things to do. Whilst we may not care so much about a crane fly, attacks on bumblebees and ladybirds cleverly garner our sympathies especially since the violence appears so mindless and unnecessary.
Farmer has been likened to Mary Shelley and certainly the nightmare fairy kingdom she has conjured from her imagination is affecting. Looking at her work, we are drawn into a microscopic world and start to imagine possible narratives and even to believing it really does exist. For instance, as we talked, I suggested to her that the fairies have it rather too easy; they need a natural predator or least a kind of obstacle to their progress. But then I was reminded of Harryhausen's skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. As Jason discovered, it is impossible to kill something that is already dead.
Ultimately, Farmer has an apocalyptic vision. Her fairies have a master plan and are involved in a plot against us which she will film in stop-motion animation. She has given the fairies bizarre flying craft. These look like futuristic spaceships, only they are made from such things as a rabbit skull, snake ribs and bird wings (presumably the spoils from previous fairy attacks) giving them a rudimentary if not archaic appearance. In these impossible, Leonardo-like machines they will attack from the air in vast numbers. Moreover, hedgehogs will be fairy-tamed to assist in the ground assault.
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
Stephen Feeke 2006
