Image from Flickr, some rights reserved by Phil Hilfiker.
Heide Hatry is an artist “best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs.” I’d not heard of her until Huffington Post made me aware of her recent work, which includes flowers using sex organs of deceased animals, hopefully not killed for this art.
You can read about what other critics/artists say on her website, and you can read her artist statement from 2012. I think it’s an interesting concept and far more unique than Huffington really allows. While the article doesn’t disparage the artwork, it does focus on one of the flowers made of a cow’s vagina and a sheep’s penis, and her use of sex organs as flower parts. The idea alone of using sexual organs to create flowers (or other items) is not new, even if we’re talking about sculpting things and photographing them, so it does Hatry a bit of disservice to focus so closely on that bit of her art; what really is quite original is that she uses other parts of other animals and doesn’t just focus on the idea of a rose, also a trite concept with female genitalia. Furthermore, her originality shows through in that she doesn’t only use female parts, so it’s not some twist to Judy Chicago or Georgia O’Keefe, when she does create the rose.
She has compiled her artwork into a book, Not a Rose, and I’m giving serious consideration to ordering it for the library. After all, this is a unique take on something that could’ve been trite or boring. Brava.
Explicit Academics 