In the corner of Sarah Vaci’s crowded Devon studio, beyond the piles of yarn, the self-portrait of the artist’s backside, and the decommissioned ambulance stretcher, rests Kim Jong-un.

In the wool fibres of his intricately actualised portrait, a twitching white fleck, the size of a grain of rice, is wrestling its way through his jet-black hair: a clothes moth larvae feasting off the North Korean leader. He is part of Vaci’s Pest and the Profound, a trio of power portraits – Kim, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – whose needle-felted faces will be sacrificed to dozens of hungry larvae in an exhibition this week.

‘Which is the real pest?’ The artist Sarah Vaci. Photograph: Sarah Vaci

When Pest and the Profound opens in a small Torquay gallery this week, the trio – each portrayed against imperial red backgrounds and housed in ornate gilded frames – will be suspended beside one another from a wooden beam, their 11kg portraits dominating the 84 square metre (900 sq ft) space.

“They will appear disembodied; it’s all a bit dystopian.” says Vaci (pronounced Vaa-tzee), as she coaxes another larva through a hatch in the top of Kim’s frame. “I’ve called the work Pest because what I’m hoping the audience might consider is ‘Which one is the real pest – the larvae or the leaders?’”

Over the next 12 months, the tiny wardrobe adversaries should munch their way through the portraits until holes appear. “I’ve always wanted to subvert the way things are seen,” Vaci says. “I’m very interested in the psychology of power and gender. I chose the three biggest egos on the planet and wanted to take them down a peg or two.”

Bugged … a larva of Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth, commutes to work. Photograph: David J Green/Alamy

The work took a year to complete, stabbing each fibre through (insecticide-free) plastic with a barbed needle, akin to tattooing with wool. “Very satisfying,” says the artist, “particularly when it’s Trump’s face.”

She adds that the work is making a point about gender as well as politics. “I’ve created three dominant men in a traditionally female medium and that brings a level of empowerment. I felt like I was subverting that imbalance as I created the faces of these alpha males.”

The artworks, priced £15,000 each, are designed to look like tributes the men could have commissioned themselves. The opulent gold and vibrant red are a powerful combination: red for danger, strength? “Blood,” says Vaci. “Moth larvae cocoons change colour according to what they eat so, eventually, there will be ‘blood’ splattered across the faces.” She smiles broadly.

Vaci is 41 and splits her time between Devon and London. She was born to Hungarian parents in 1977 and had a middle-class upbringing in London, attending an all-girls school, where she was desperately unhappy. “I hated girls and being a girl. There was an implication it was better to be a boy.”

Nobody really wants to see faces eaten alive but it satisfies some tiny urge Sarah Vaci

Her maternal grandmother was an artist, working with oils; her other grandmother made dolls clothes and puppets that line the eclectic walls of her Devon flat-cum-studio, along with prints of Boticelli’s Venus and Mars and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and giant murals.

Vaci studied video installation art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design and, via the Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom, embarked on an exploration of the hardcore and provocative. At one point, in the early 2000s, a film of her “shitting and pretending to eat my own shit” was projected on to a building in Hoxton Square, London. Concurrently, she taught video animation in prisons, hospitals and to children with autism and led workshops at the British Museum.

When her son was born in 2010, she became severely depressed. This week’s exhibition will also feature I’m Just a Little Tired – a visceral umbilical cord noose made from wool, textile hardener and silicone. “I want all my art to say to the viewer: ‘Look again; look closely.’”

A felt Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Sarah Vaci

Back in her flat, among the “quality Devon potato” boxes stuffed inside her storage cupboard, a plastic box containing old clothes, wool, strands of hair and a few drops of her son’s wee have provided ripe living conditions for 140 moth larvae for the past five months. They are now at their most destructive and may not cocoon for another two years. So for now, in the artworks, they have 34 fibrous square inches of playground in which they can crawl through the crinkles around Trump’s eyes or erode his gleaming teeth.

“I hope to turn textile art on its head,” Vaci says. “There’s a debate about the line between art and craft. For me, it becomes art when the context is what’s dominant and interesting. I want people to be drawn to the meaning first and then ask, ‘How did she do that?’ As Grayson Perry so successfully did when he put pottery in a contemporary context.”

Social media previews of Pest have already attracted plenty of hate messages from Trump and Putin supporters. One recipient of Vaci’s newsletter responded: “This is completely vile and disgusting. You are filthy!” Whether you hate or embrace it, she sees her work as a type of essentialism. “There is an idea that the essence of a person is imbued in their image. So, a photo of your kids is just a photo but you might not cut it up. Nobody really wants to see faces eaten alive but it satisfies some tiny urge.

“In my mind, the larvae are the revolution. Each of these politicians have people they view as pests. For Trump, it could be women and immigrants; for Putin it’s probably gay people. They view them as small and insignificant, but if they, the ‘little people’, eat them, then who has the last laugh?”