TALLINN - My brain did a serious double take when I was introduced to Mall Nukke last month. "Oh, have you met Mall?" a friend from the art world asked casually, "She's doing interesting collages using human bones."
Human bones? The idea of making artwork using skeletal remains sounded utterly revolting. Naturally I had to find out more.
Driven by journalistic curiosity, or maybe my addiction to "The X-Files," I met up with the artist at her studio a couple of weeks later. I was half expecting black walls and sputtering candles, but the room was sunny, and filled with oversized paintings. After shifting a few of these around, she found one of the ones we were looking for.
Like all the others, it was large - more than a meter long. On a swampy green background, photographs of two faces, one on each side, peered out of the shadows. Between them were the words "body" and "soul." And stuck right in the middle of all this, sure enough, was some guy's femur.
"I didn't just dig this up from the cemetery," Nukke assured me.
The bones, in fact, come from a legitimate source. They're supplied by the Estonian Art Academy's anatomy class, and originated, presumably, from people who have donated their bodies to science.
Nukke is actually a successful, well-established artist whose work has been on display in galleries from Moscow to New York. She's probably best known for her pioneering work in reviving pop art in Estonia in the 1990s. For the last 10 years, she has been teaching graphics at the Estonian Art Academy. This week, an exhibition featuring some of her works is opening in Normandy.
She is also something of a professional cynic. Her favorite theme since 2000 has been Russian icons, or rather, "non-icons" as she calls them. Using special ageing varnishes, she creates what at first look exactly like antique icons. But on further inspection, one notices that the saints are carrying little Estonian flags, or that they're surrounded by euro symbols.
According to Nukke, it was working with the ideas of fantasy and religion, specifically icons and relics, that led to her interest in bones about two years ago.
Her first bone series was six collages entitled "Body or Soul." Not all use human bones - some are animal bones she found on her travels. But all combine at least one bone with a Photoshopped portrait or two, and sometimes a few lines of a Yeats poem.
This way of mixing human remains with faces and poetry seems a fairly bold exploration of the relationship between body and soul. "They are separate and connected, like black and white," explained Nukke.
Her second series, while it uses photos of bones rather than the real thing, might be even spookier. These works, entitled "Urbanid" or "Urban Animals" are Photoshopped and digiprinted manipulations combining human skeletons with animal elements. One particularly nightmarish example, laid out like Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," features a human skeleton with both angelic swan wings and devilish steer horns. In another, a man's spine is fused with that of a wild boar.
Artistic merit aside, it's hard to get around the fact that a few of these works use real human bones - a hand here, a jaw there, and that these once belonged to somebody. We'll never know exactly know to whom.
This raises some intriguing questions. If someone donates their body to science, can they donate it to art as well? What if I want to donate my body to literature? And what happens if I donate my body to sport? Will my head be used as a practice football?
Nukke takes a more practical approach. "I think this person, whoever it was, doesn't need this," she said, speaking of the femur in her work. She raised the possibility that the donor might even like the idea of having his leg bone contributing to the art world in this way. "Otherwise it will just rot somewhere," she said.
