FACTUM ARTE - Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn is not the first artist to use the carcasses of animals within his work. Other artists have used them as a way to explore mortality. But Quinn takes a slightly different approach by using the carcass directly. He creates poses that reference traditional figurative sculpture such as torsos or reclining nudes.
The casts from rabbits take on a Rodin-like elegance. From certain angles they could be mistaken for reclining human figures; the stumps of their necks appear like small heads. At other angles, their skin falls like cloth, revealing glimpses of innards. Quinn's sculptures contain a quiet dignity. He has said:

"Somehow all life is the same. All life has the same origin. It has to because there is nowhere else for it to come from. Human beings are very grand and think they're above everything but in fact we're connected to everything else"

Reduced version of the standing rabbit (30mm tall) cast into 0.002mm wax layers. This was used to make an edition of small silver rabbits.

As with his orchid sculptures, scale plays a very important part in Quinn's work. One of the main advantages of digitally recording an object is that, in digital form, scale is not fixed and can be manipulated with relative ease. Factum Arte now has what is possibly the best-equipped workshop for digitally recording objects in three dimensions at the highest resolution. This equipment was used to record three of Marc Quinn's flayed rabbits from the show ‘Flesh’. Once scanned, the files were assembled and processed before being sent to Delcam UK where they were cut in three dimensions on five-axis routing machines.

Virtual model scanned from the flayed carcass of a rabbit. The rabbit was scanned using a NUB 3D white light scanning system.

Routed reclining rabbit. The material used is a high density polyurethene.

Once routed and reassembled, the sculptures were brought back to Madrid where they were cast in bronze at Fademesa foundry. Alongside the 2.2 meter bronze casts Factum Arte also produced a miniature version of each. The 3D files were sent to Barcelona and printed in wax at a resolution of 25 microns. They were then molded and cast in silver in Madrid.