French artist Abraham Poincheval, who famously spent a week inside a rock and two weeks inside a bear sculpture, has succeeded in hatching chicken eggs after incubating them for some three weeks.

Poincheval embarked on his latest project in late March of imitating a mother hen by incubating some 10 eggs with his own body heat inside a glass vivarium at Paris' Palais de Tokyo contemporary art museum.

"I will, broadly speaking, become a chicken," Poincheval said last month.

Poincheval had said he wanted to explore varying concepts of time for different species and natural objects in his performances. 

In his latest experiment, Poincheval sat on a chair with the eggs in a container fixed under the seat.

He had calculated that the heat from his body - kept high by him being wrapped in a thick, insulating blanket designed by Korean artist Seglui Lee - would maintain the right temperature directly over the eggs, and he ate foods such as ginger to raise his body temperature.

Poincheval allowed himself to stand up and leave his place over the eggs for no more than 30 minutes a day to receive meals that were brought to him.

For his own calls of nature he used a box beneath him, though he was not able to get up to relieve himself.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.