They are not the most obvious things from which to cast bronze chess pieces – mummified small animals such as toads and squirrels lovingly collected from a Gloucestershire farm – but they do look surprisingly appropriate.
"It was a real labour of love and it is a beautiful thing," said Mark Sanders, of art and design company RS&A, as he admired the woodland chess board and pieces of a new work by British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster.
The work has gone on public display for the first time at the Saatchi Gallery in London, part of an exhibition bringing together 16 chess sets made over the past decade by contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread.
They are part of a project which began in 2003 when the fledgling RS&A commissioned five artists – Damien Hirst, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama, Maurizio Cattelan and Jake and Dinos Chapman – to create sets. A resulting show was put on at Somerset House with older chess sets by artists including Marcel Duchamp and Yoko Ono and it was a huge success.
Julia Royse, of RS&A, said: "The response was fantastic and we were contacted by artists who wanted to make them and galleries who wanted to show them. The chess sets were a kind of easy access to the contemporary art that these artists were making."
The concept grew and the Saatchi show includes the Noble and Webster set which will be the last.
"It just feels right to end it now," said Royse.
Asking artists to engage with chess is not new and RS&A were inspired by the London gallerist Julien Levy who, in the mid-1940s, commissioned artists such as Max Ernst and Alexander Calder to make chess sets. He also commissioned Duchamp, the father of conceptual art, who loved chess so much that he ditched art and took it up professionally.
Not all the artists play chess. Hirst does not while Emin does.
Paul McCarthy is said to be almost fanatical playing every day at his home in Los Angeles, and his set on display at the Saatchi gallery has bizarrely random things plucked from his kitchen as pieces. A bottle of tomato ketchup as a rook, a lint roller as a bishop, a cigarette lighter as a pawn and a butt plug on a bottle of cranberry juice as king.
Royse said: "Garry Kasparov saw the show when we took it to Moscow and said that this was the one he'd want to play on."
Emin was inspired by the 18th century notion of chess being a kind of courtship when men and women would go to the park and play chess and she is the only one who made a travelling set.
Younger artists are also represented, including Alastair Mackie who was interested in the idea of insects in amber and the scientific research that goes on to get DNA from amber millions of years old. He researched the amber collection at the Natural History Museum and has created a board made from 5,000-year-old bog oak, with chess pieces that have creepy crawlies in amber pitted against flying insects in amber.
The Art of Chess is at the Saatchi Gallery until 3 October.
• This article was amended on 10 September 2012. The original referred to Michael rather than Mark Sanders of RS&A. This has been corrected.
