Tatton Park Biennial: Sited Commissions
TESSA FARMER in collaboration with SEAN DANIELS has created a stop motion animation film of her malevolent fairies inhabiting a scarecrow, installed in the Paxton Fernery.
short video extract
Still images from stop motion animation:
Nest of the Skeletons
Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels’ stop motion animation works with Tatton Park as a place in which not just flora, but fauna, too, vies for attention and competes for space.
The film introduces viewers to a previously hidden world, where malevolent fairies have constructed a nest for themselves inside the guts of a weathered scarecrow in the Kitchen Garden. Built from seeds, leaves, twigs, roots, eggs, snail shells, mushrooms, moss and a woollen mitten, the nest’s components have been gathered from the gardens and grounds of Tatton in the tradition of birds and insects, which use external sources and materials to construct their habitats.
The fairy nest is divided into specific, purpose-built areas of activity. The Nursery space cares for the youngest fairies, newly hatched from their cocoons, while the Feeding Room is a containing space in which doting elders throw insects down to the hungry young of the colony. The Arena is a place of spectacular combat, where a fairy and a wasp wrestle in front of an enraged audience. The Larder stores captured insects for later eating and/or torture, as well as a stolen bird’s egg, which has been pushed inside a child's mitten, to ensure incubation and hatching of the baby bird prior to its consumption (like the calf that exists to become veal).
These fairies are not the stuff of Disney, but are part of a richer, darker, more ancient mythology that instils fear rather than pleasure-filled fantasy. Their existence reminds us of the harsh realities of the life cycles of plants and animals, which need to consume resources at the expense of their competitors in order to survive. Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels’ stop motion animation works with Tatton Park as a place in which not just flora, but fauna, too, vies for attention and competes for space.
Biography: Tessa Farmer
Tessa Farmer received an MA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. She was selected for New Contemporaries in 2004, and has shown at firstsite, Colchester; the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland and in Parabola's Repatriating the Ark at the Museum of Garden History, London. In 2007 she was artist in residence at The Natural History Museum, London, where the exhibition Little Savages was shown. Her work will be shown at the new Saatchi gallery and at the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania in 2009.
Biography: Sean Daniels
Sean Daniels was born in Reading in 1981. He studied photography from the age of thirteen. During his BA in Photography and Digital Imaging he discovered an interest in Audio Visual work, which lead to a focus on film making for the last two years of the course. In this time he created a series pilot consisting of twelve sketches and the film why my wet bag?.
After graduating he spent a year working as a croupier whilst continuing to make various installations, films and documentaries. He then went on to study directing at the National Film and Television School where he made a trilogy of short films (The Ultimate Sandwich, Ash and One Day at a Time). He recently met Tessa Farmer which in turn lead to the making of the short animation An Insidious Intrusion for the Natural History Museum.