Tessa Farmer

Tessa Farmer, born 1978 in Birmingham, is an artist based in London. She received a BFA and MFA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. Constructed from insect carcasses, taxidermy, bones, plant roots and many other found natural materials, her work comprises complex installations and animations depicting Boschian battles between animals and tiny winged skeletal humanoids. The work mimics the natural world, revealing the ever fascinating, often violent, unseen worlds that lie beneath our feet.

Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is in many public and private collections including those of The Saatchi Gallery, London, The David Roberts Collection, London, The Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, London, and The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Reimagining The Victorians’, Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham, ‘Insect Odyssey: Insects, Books and the Artistic Imagination’, Salisbury Museum, ‘NatureMax’, GIANT Gallery, Bournemouth, and ‘In Fairyland’, Pound Arts Centre, Corsham.

In 2007 she was artist in residence at the Natural History Museum in London and was nominated for The Times/ Southbank Show Breakthrough Award. In 2011 she was awarded a Kindle Project ‘Makers Muse' Award that funded a collecting expedition to Chilean rainforests with entomologists from the Natural History Museum, London.