Across the room is a kitchen, where Witter cooks up her ingredients: boiling the bones, before bleaching, drying, salting, sealing and sorting them – a process perfected through trial and error, since the bones react and change as she works on them. Only then does she start gluing them to build her sculptures. ‘The prep takes forever, but I find it quite therapeutic and ritualistic,’ she says. ‘I’m interested in the idea of funerary rituals.’
The larger bones come directly from restaurants, hauled back to her studio and living space in London’s Hoxton in an inconspicuous duffle bag, while many of the smaller ones are leftovers from her own meals or those of her friends. ‘When we go out for dinner, my friends pass bones down the table to me,’ she says. ‘I tell the waiters they’re for my dog.’