Tokushige Hideki's Delicate 'Bone Flowers'

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Tokushige Hideki has a curious hobby.

The Japanese artist collects the carcasses of rodents and other small creatures, from pet shops, where they are sold as reptile feed.

Hideki outlines his artistic process like so:

" Take bones out
Make flowers
Leave images
Break, Return to the earth."

First, he painstakingly disassembles the dead bodies, removing their pelts and bones. These are then used to create intricate, fragile sculptures in the shape of flowers, including mornings glories, dandelions, and loutses.

Hideki refers to these sculptures--which are comprised of hundreds of tiny spines, pelvises, and skulls--as "honebana," or "bone flowers." The flowers appear as if they could have been made from carefully woven lace or finely cut paper.

It is not until you get extremely close that you can make out the tell-tale ridges and claws.

Once the sculptures are erected, Hideki photographs them or exhibits them for a brief period of time before collapsing them and ritualistically burying the remains.

Though Hideki's fascination with bones may seem morbid, he insists that his creative process is done entirely out of respect for the dead and a desire to return to his ancestors' primal roots:

"Mankind and bones have been good friends for very long time, many products out of animal bones have been found from the stratum of those ages...Everything that consists [in] our modern life including those clothes, nuclear power plants, and Internet have roots in those ancestor's fingers which worked bones into tools...In our world of lesser foresight, it is time to go back to the fundamental by re-thinking about the bones.

And this may give us an opportunity to reconsider our unsteady passage."

Hideki's ethereal "honebana" illustrate the fleeting and delicate nature of life, as well the growing disconnect between man and the natural world.

More images can be found on Hideki's website.