If Andrea Hasler (previously on Neatorama) invites you to go camping, beware! She may want to sleep inside this gruesome flesh and blood tent.
The art piece above, titled "Matriarch" and a smaller accompanying piece called "Next of Kin" are made from sculpted fiberglass covered with wax, leather and blood details that look like human intestines, tissues and skin.
Hasler, the Zurich, Switzerland-born and now London-based artist, was commissioned by New Greenham Arts to create a piece for Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. That site held the Women's Peace Camp, which was made famous when 30,000 women joined hands around the perimeter of an American airbase to protest nuclear weapons being held there. Hasler explained that "Metaphorically, I am taking the notion of the tents which were on site during the Women's Peace Camp, as the container for emotions, and 'humanise' these elements to create emotional surfaces."
The larger of the two tents, according to Hasler, is a full-sized replica, whereas the other is scaled down and represents a mother and child relationship. "It’s almost like I am taking the fabric of the tent, the sort of the nylon element of the tent, and I make the fabric, this skin layer as sort of the container for emotion, or sort of the container to hold emotion, as in the skin holding emotion."
Hasler's art exhibition Embrace the Base is on view at the Corn Exchange Newbury & New Greenham Arts through April 11, 2014.