Artist:
Simon Starling (born 1967 in Epsom, England; lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark).

Materials:
Hen house, brick stove, eggs, egg cookers, cooking pot, saw, tarpaulin; dimensions variable.

Description:
Wilhelm Wagenfeld created his classic egg coddler design while working at the Bauhaus. Seeing this design became the the starting point for Starling to rebuild a miniature version of the Wagenfeld museum in Bremen, as a hen house. This was installed on a free-range chicken farm in Scotland, where Starling gathered many eggs. These were then cooked in Wagenfeld coddlers on a stove at the Camden Arts Center: the stove was built with bricks from the Arts Center building (which had formerly been a library), fuelled by wood from the now derelict hen house

“What came first: the chicken or the egg? The Glasgow-based artist Simon Starling would probably answer, the Bauhaus designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld. In anticipation of his first solo show in Berlin, Starling made a model of the neoclassical building that houses the Wagenfeld Museum in Bremen, and used it last year as a chicken coop at a farm in Scotland. Starling even takes the migratory process one step further: Eggs from the Scottish farm are being cooked in Wagenfeld’s glass egg-coddlers in a brick oven, itself a model of the gallery building, which used to house a furnace.”
—Jennifer Allen, review of “Simon Starling: ‘burn time’,” Neuegerriemschneider, Berlin, Artforum, 2001.