Artist Marc Quinn had an unusual idea. Using 4.5 liters of blood collected from his body over a 5-month period, he has assembled a self portrait. He didn’t mix the blood with clay, or paint with the blood, or anything of that sort. He took it one creepy step further and made the self portrait out of frozen blood. The piece, called Self, is getting a lot of attention, if only because it’s supremely gross (and, I have to admit, pretty cool-looking).
Quinn plans on repeating this every five years to create an interesting set of self portraits, but that’s going to be a lot of wasted blood. I wonder if those heads are going to stay frozen forever, or if they’ll eventually be taken out of the freezer and tossed away. Can the blood be recycled, or is there a shelf life? I’d imagine that the blood would be useless after being frozen for five years, but then again I know very little about how blood banks work.
Tags: Self, Marc Quinn, art, self-portrait made of frozen blood, blood, gross art, unusual art