
Tessa Farmer: Miniature Worlds
Sculptor Tessa Farmer builds armies of skeletal fairies from insect parts, wire, and plant roots, then stages them attacking the mounted specimens of London's Natural History Museum. The film follows her collaboration with the museum's Entomology Department, watching her work at close range as she poses tiny figures riding wasps and swarming taxidermied birds, turning the museum's own scientific collection into a battlefield for her invented mythology. Footage moves between her studio, where the fairies are assembled from real insect wings and bone-like fragments, and the museum's cases, where the finished tableaux are installed among the specimens they seem to be attacking. The short gives Farmer room to describe her process and her fascination with decay, parasites, and the darker side of the natural world that inspired the figures. It is a compact look at how a working artist turns entomological specimens most people would walk past into an unsettling, detailed miniature narrative.