The unmade bed by Tracey Emin caused a stir at the Turner Prize a few years ago, but now the Tate Britain gallery has an even stranger bed on display - made entirely of white bread.

The work, simply called Bed, was made from 8,000 slices from which the sculptor, Antony Gormley, carefully ate away his own imprint. The result is the size of a normal double bed, with two hollow human shapes.

Today Mr Gormley, who won fame for the monumental Angel of the North sculpture on a hill near Gateshead, described how he had to eat his own volume in Mother's Pride over the course of three months to create the work.

Once he had shaped the bits of bread with his teeth, he dipped them in paraffin wax to stop them going mouldy, and dried them on radiators in his house.

"I made a drawing like a contour map which told me how much bread I needed to eat every day," he told the Evening Standard.

"The entire house in Peckham was covered in racks of drying bitten bread. I've not eaten Mother's Pride since."

Since then, the work is said to have been treated by Rentokil to prevent it rotting away.

The bizarre artwork is one of Mr Gormley's earliest works playing with the shape and form of the human body. He made it between 1980 and 1981.

Bed has been displayed in Tate St Ives, but today it was unveiled in London’s Tate Britain as the centrepiece of a room dedicated to Mr Gormley's achievements - a rare accolade for a living artist.

Also on display is Natural Selection 1981, in which natural objects, such as an egg, and man-made ones, such as a hand-grenade and a sex toy, have been coated in lead and arranged side by side. Mr Gormley said it was an "ironic reference to Darwin’s theory of evolution".

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