Standing Sausage Vanity Mirror by Gavin Stanley Keightley

According to the designer,

'I watched a documentary about Arctic explorers that were stranded and unlikely to make it back to civilisation. Their attempt to get home left them without food and shelter. With diminishing numbers, the last few men used the 'last remaining resource' to prolong their chances of survival.

I like this term 'last remaining resource' because it aims to remove the stigma of what these men did, and intends to change our viewpoint to seeing the human body as a resource.

My project aims to do the same, to look at the body as a material. I wanted to see how it can be utilised and used in the context of making objects.

In the future, we may need to evaluate what materialism means to us, and how we value our own matter. If we are to adopt a 'zero waste' culture we must explore all aspects of this.

But we should do it in a fun way, with sausages.

This piece is made with a blend of traditional sausage filling techniques and contemporary materials. The real collagen sausage skin is filled with jesmonite and horse hair fibres. The mirror also has a decorative keratin glue backing that mimics traditional tortoiseshell, a once popular material for these objects.'