Extinct Bird Sculptures Created From Fast Food Chicken Bones

What do you do with your chicken bones after you eat all the meat off them? I eat a lot of chicken wings, and back in 2009, I even wrote an article about how to correctly eat a chicken wing. It never occurred to me until today that the leftover carcasses might be useful. I should start saving them so I can mail them to Christy Rupp for her extinct bird sculptures.

Christy is a vegetarian who collects chicken bones from anywhere she can get them. That includes fast food restaurants, BBQ restaurants, and even off her friends’ plates. Since usually the bones are full of sauce, grease and all kinds of other leftover yumminess, she takes them back to her studio to boil and bleach them.

She then uses the bones to create sculptures of extinct birds. On her website she writes, “Poultry grown for the fast food market is mass produced in the speediest, cheapest and unhealthy of conditions. We eat them, ingesting their antibiotics, hormones and pesticides.” Gosh, suddenly my favorite chicken wings seem a little disgusting. She researches each bird at the American Museum of Natural History before she begins recreating its body. She’s definitely raising awareness about processed and genetically modified food. I wish I could see the scale of these sculptures because it seems like they would have to be really small, but I’m not sure. It’s definitely an unusual form of recycling, and it’s a little creepy, but I like it!

Via: [What The Cool] [Inhabitat]