Art: Hideki Tokushige makes flower sculptures out of tiny animal bones

Got a weird hobby? Unicycling, perhaps, or dressing your pets up as people and then photographing them? Or do you, like Hideki Tokushige, spend your days collecting the carcasses of tiny dead creatures, stripping them down to their bones and then reassembling them in tiny fragile botanical sculptures?

Yes, Hideki wins (unless you’ve got some seriously weird extra-curricular activities going on). His project Honebana is Japanese for bone-flowers, and it has him creating these tiny ethereal, slightly otherworldly flora out of bones that were once rodents and little animals. The sculptor, who originally trained as a photographer, was inspired by the life cycle of flowers being absorbed into the Earth and nourishing future plants. He explains: “We’ve been creating paintings and sculptures for over 70,000 years and our relationship to bones is just as old. Everything around us – clothes, nuclear power plants, internet – can be traced back to the structure of bones.” Still think I’d rather have a nice bunch of daffs on my coffee table.