Taxidermist & sculptor Lisa Black combines taxidermy with working gears and other mechanical contraptions including, yes, a wind-up baby crocodile. You tell me what to think of this because, really, I've got no idea where to begin.

See more of her work here +

Read Melissa Milgrom's article "When a Polar Bear Needs a Pedicure" published in the Science section of The New York Times back in 2002.  Milgrom explores the Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio in Milltown, established in 1921 and now in its third generation of Schwendemans.  The family philosophy is one of respect and intuition: ''You have to have a respect and intuition for the animal to bring out its best qualities.'' Taxidermy isn't just upholstery or model-making. ''Being a taxidermist is very idiosyncratic,'' Bruce Schwendeman said. But the desire to recreate life continues to occupy the human imagination. ''Morticians have it easy,'' he went on. ''Their patients only have to last a week. Sculptors can make a mistake and remelt it. We only have one shot. These are unique individuals and we cannot replace them.''

Read the whole article here +

In her essay “Living like Weasels” in Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard writes of her startled encounter with a weasel by Hollins Pond near Tinker Creek. As Dillard sat beside the lake at sunset, she turned and suddenly, inexplicably, she was looking down at a weasel, and he was looking up at her:

“The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild-rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness, twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of the brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloon. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.”

In that moment of recognition, Dillard learns something about the weasel and the weasel’s purity of living in nature and necessity: “tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone.” But then Dillard blinked, and the weasel vanished back under the wild rose.

But what does this have to do with taxidermy? It is one thing to look into the small black eyes of a living weasel; it is quite another to confront the glass eyes of a stuffed weasel posed on a shelf safely behind glass in a museum. Meetings with wild liveliness are fleeting, unpredictable, haphazard, precious, and perhaps even dangerous. In contrast, taxidermy offers the flat glassy perpetual gaze of a manhandled beast. A living evanescence or dead eternity. It is hardly possible that a stuffed animal could captivate like Dillard’s warm-blooded weasel. Perhaps. But then, imagine entering a room filled with trophy heads or seeing a Victorian cabinet hoarded with a hundred hummingbirds or realising that your parents decided to stuff
Pascal Bernier, "Wild Boar," 1997. Taken from Bernier's
website. [go +]
the family dog. Disgust, horror, fascination, admiration, wonder – no viewer is neutral to taxidermy. Death doesn't make us indifferent animals. Hardly.

Perhaps no contemporary writer has drawn a better understanding of the importance of appreciating other species than Edward O. Wilson in his book Biophilia. The work relates his life experiences as an entomologist searching out the lives and behaviours of ants and, more especially, with the “intractable mystery” of the teeming organic diversity of our planet, which sustains and nurtures all life. From childhood, Wilson writes, we learn “to distinguish life from the inanimate and move towards it like moths to a porch light.” The metaphor is as vivid as it is sinister and underlines the conservationist emphasis captured by the term biophilia: if we do not appreciate and decipher our co-dependence on nature and its diversity, all species including our own will suffer. Although Wilson austerely defined biophilia as our species’ “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes,” the book offers a far more intricate and intimate picture of human dependence on our natural habitat and its other inhabitants. Beyond meeting our material needs for food and shelter, knowing nature well satisfies cravings for aesthetic, imaginative, intellectual, and even metaphysical meaning and sustenance.

For obvious reasons, biologists, philosophers, and conservationists who have engaged and fleshed out Wilson’s writings on biophilia have rarely considered the character of this innate connection with life after death. Their emphasis is, after all, with appreciating and conserving biodiversity, in keeping things alive. The notion itself remains a hypothesis however. As Stephen R. Kellert explains in his introduction to The Biophilia Hypothesis, an anthology dedicated to examining the theoretical, poetic, and empirical richness encapsulated by the term, this very richness precludes finding definitive proof of biophilia. “We are forced to behave, instead, much like the blind men of the old allegory: convinced of the beast’s existence but ready to confess to having little detailed understanding of its precise shape, form, content, structure, and function.” But if beast does exist, perhaps the best proof – strangely enough – is realized after death. We know instinctively that preserved bits or whole creatures were once alive and pulsating with life, and we can’t help but respond.

Take the taxidermied bandaged creatures in a series entitled Accidents de Chasse (Hunting Accidents) by contemporary artist Pascal Bernier. The stuffed foxes, fawns, tigers, and chicks with gentle eyes and bandaged heads and limbs are presented as dismal victims of some terror. The eyes are glass; there is no life in their bodies, but despite being decidedly dead, the bandaged creatures nevertheless pull on our heartstrings almost as if they were still alive.  Jonathan Burt makes a similiar claim for the ways viewers react to cinematic animal death and abuse in Old Yeller, The Yearling, and Black Beauty, or even in the classic animation, Bambi.  As Burt stresses, even if the imagery is recognized as contrived, audiences still respond "as if these images were living animals." Why should this be?

Pascal Bernier, "Deer," 1996. Taken from Bernier's website. [go +]

Central to Burt argument is that emotional responses to animal imagery are in fact integral to their meaning, and that this meaning is inevitably shot through with ethical considerations. Perhaps no image has made this more clear – that aesthetic encounters with animals are at once emotional and ethical – then the iconic image of Brigitte Bardot cuddling a baby seal in her 1977 protest against Canadian sealers. It is looking at animals, Burt maintains, really seeing them, making the effort to recognise their moods, motions, and behaviours, even if only in the two-dimensionality of film, that “actually integrates us with the natural world.” 

But looking at taxidermy is looking at death, and looking at death cannot but be ethically controversial. How did the animal die? And why? And should we be looking at them now? As taxidermy is the use of animals for looking and the knowledge and reveries that arise from looking, taxidermy is necessarily voyeuristic: the animal does not stare back. The animal is dead. Dead, yes. But not gone. The animal continues to exert itself, its presence, its form, beauty, charisma, and that organic connection we feel with all life. Bernier's bandaged animals continue to speak of irreparable loss, sadness, distress. They could be poster children for environmental doomsayers: mere tattered shells of their former health, soundness, and beauty; what has been wounded will never recover despite all our best efforts. And in looking at them, we become complicit with both the violence and the rescue. That is to say, we respond to Bernier's deer and baby boar in a fundamentally different way that to any objects made from skins, leather shoes, for example, or leather couches. But why?

The spontaneous encounter between Dillard and her weasel, unplanned and unchoreographed, stands in sharp contrast to encounters with taxidermy. Intention and artistry pervades every inch of taxidermy, from choosing which creature to kill through to posing and arranging its skins. And while very little nature is unaffected by humanity activity (agriculture, gardening, selective breeding) and while human creativity and natural phenomena are so entwined that it is near impossible to pull our cultural imaginings of animals apart from the actual living beast, taxidermy would seem to be pure interpretation, pure artistry. Surely the animal has been stamped out and replaced by a manmade simulation of life: no one could ever mistake a breathing creature for its taxidermic reconstruction. And, technically speaking, considering the skinning, tanning, sewing, and stuffing involved in both taxidermy and upholstery, a leather chair is not so very different than a piece of taxidermy.

But of course they are different. Anyone who has ever stepped into a room with leather furniture and hunting trophy can attest to that inescapable fact – taxidermy is not mere upholstery. Good taxidermy can capture some sense of the creature’s former liveliness and character; exceptional taxidermy may even achieve that uncanny spark of animation which gives viewers the tingling sensation that the hawk might any moment leave its perch or the lion might spring through the glass. But even bad taxidermy and old, poorly crafted mounts will evoke a visceral realization that this thing is not just a human-made artefact no different than any sort of product made from animal skins. The animal is be dead; the animal may be stuffed.  The thrill of meeting a wild weasel is gone, but stuffed beasts have lost none of their emotional and ethical potency. 

Check out John Bland's short 2008 film "Life can be so nice" on Iris Shieferstein, a German artist who works with dead animals.  Joining the fragments together to create new creatures Shieferstein's pieces are hauting commentaries on beauty, necessity, life, sexuality, and death.  A bit ghoulish at times, but intensely compelling. "The earlier you die - the longer you are dead."

Watch the film here: http://www.oneeyedmonster.tv/content/issues/issue1/movies/IrisSchieferstein/LifeCanBeSoNice.html

Click here for Shieferstein's website: http://www.iris-schieferstein.de/ (in English and German)