A Wimbledon art student plans to "eat her Instagram" next week as part of her degree.

Natalie Wearden will eat 3,000 images printed onto tracing paper as they are deleted from her social media account. It is one of seven performance pieces she has created to complete her undergraduate degree from the Wimbledon College of Art.

The Merton Park campus is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London.

Miss Wearden's Instagram images will be contained within 250 balloons, and will be consumed one at a time in order of their appearance on Miss Wearden's Instagram feed.

Fellow performance artist Phoebe Patey-Furguson will burst the balloons and read the captions of each Instagram photo before deleting it from the account.

The prints will be the same size as they appear on an iPhone screen. Miss Wearden admits she has tried eating some and they were "OK", but the performance may take some time.

Miss Wearden's Instagram account, which she started in September 2013, depicts her life just before she moved to London. Originally from Chester, Natalie now lives near Holloway, in Islington.

She said: "I’m addicted to Instagram and the internet, it’s so much a part of what I do. I haven’t really accepted that it’s going to go.

"At the moment I’m in the process of printing it out and looking at them physically and it’s quite weird. But that form of nostalgia is really negative, as you can think I was really happy or skinny but that’s not necessarily how it was.

“You only put the good stuff on Instagram, and you leave out the bad.”

She said once the photos have been deleted (and eaten), she will leave the account empty.

She said: "It's symbolic of a teenage version of myself. I wanted to move to London and study art, work in a shop and have a blue hair. That was my dream and I did it. It's about making space for new dreams."

It will be assessed as part of her Fine Art student's degree, which she has been studying for three years. She has six other rituals planned, which include taking off her make-up, and ripping up her clothes which she describes as "extremely gothy".

The 22-year-old says the performance installation is a metaphor for destroying elements of her teenage self and represents a "rite of passage". It will allow her transition to a “finished adult or artist.”

Miss Wearden will "eat her Instagram" on Monday June 19 at 10am as part of 10 days of the college's summer shows.