Pascal Bernier's works portray a world disenchanted with its own lost innocence, a world which is marred by the violence of science, agriculture, and human desires. His taxidermied pieces highlight the roles in which we place animals and the fantasies that animals - whether hunted or farmed, taxidermied or cloned - allow us to dream about ourselves. His bandaged taxidermied animals from his series labelled (Hunting Accidents) are at once ludicrous and pathetically endearing. On the one hand, the idea of carefully bandaging a stuffed polar bear or penguin is playfully absurd, on the other, the act acknowledges irreparable loss - what has been wounded will never in fact recover despite all our best efforts. The bandaged animals could be poster children for environmental doomsayers: mere tattered shells of their former health, soundness, and beauty which have all been been irrevocably lost. Ultimately Bernier's works are about the merciless blindness inherent in human nature.

Sarina Brewer's Custom Creatures Taxidermy Using only salvaged bits of roadkill, discarded pieces of livestock, and other donated animal items, Sarina Brewer reimagines the boundaries between species and between myth and concrete form. Her work veers from the beautiful through the eerie to the downright shudder-worthy. You'll find such pieces as two-headed cats, a modern day chimeras composed of three vulture heads and a cat's body, and pickled rats. "I call it art," she writes on her website, "you can call it whatever you want."  A founding member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy, Brewer's art has been represented by ...

 

Maurizio Cattelan a maverick Italian contemporary artist known for bizarre scenarios and strange humour.  Sometimes describes as a Shakespearian fool, Cattelan's humour is said to reveal darker truths underlying our society. His works included a post-suicidal taxidermied squirrel slumped over a yellow formica table, suspended taxidermied horses, the pope pinned to the ground by a meteorite, and a performance of him dressed as a giant pink phallus.  "My aim is to be as open and as incomprehensible as possible. There has to be a perfect balance between open and shut," he explained to Sophie Arie in an interview for the Guardian [read it +] 

Jeanie M's Tiny Taxidermy Treasures specialising in mice dressed in Elizabethan garb or transformed in vampires with caps, horned devils, and winged angels. Her mouse-a-dermy even made an appearance on the Jay Leno Show.

Idiots is a collaborative project by Dutch artists Afke Golsteijn, Ruben Taneja and Floris Bakker. Combining their talents with glass, metal, embroidery, and taxidermy, the artists decorate and adorn real animals, transfiguring them from regular creatures – rabbits, hedgehogs, swans, birds, mice – into the tragic heroes of contemporary fairy tales. In one work the ears of a rabbit, the head mounted on a wall as a traditional hunting trophy, are embroidered with intricate looping flowers. In another, a small hedgehog has been mounted the antique frame of a child’s wheeled toy. Sewing pins blend in with its own quills. The works oscillate between brutality and beauty, melancholy and wonder. Ultimately viewers are left to make meaning of the pieces from their own reservoir of images.  [read more +]

Known as a vegan taxidermist, Robert Marbury documents the existence of little known wild and feral plush animals inhabiting our urban environments.  With tongue firmly in cheek, through his Urban Beast Project, Marbury hopes to garner attention and general concern for the plight of such strange creatures.  As he describes on his webpage: while most of the Urban Beasts exhibited on his site "have met the end of their species, it is our hope that with exposure and attention many other Beasts will be saved."

This little brown beast is the lesser Yeti or Mestipho.  "Mephisto has the identifying reddish-black hair covering his body and during his liftime his odor was almost unbearable to a new acquaintance." Despite his insane snarl, Mestipho is a gentle soul, a strict vegetarian, and severely endangered.

Check out all the other creatures: http://www.urbanbeast.com/beasts/.html

 

Polly Morgan, a young British taxidermy artist, creates tiny intimacies and delicate habitats all with a heavy lick of morbid beauty.  In an interview with the Telegraph in April 2008, Morgan describes her work: "What [taxidermists] are trying to do is to recreate a wildlife image in 3D, a classic pose, something you'd see in the countryside. I am more interested in the moment between something dying and decaying - anything between a few hours and a week. There's something beautiful about that."   Her lastest exhibition "You dig the tunnel; I'll hide the soil" is at the White Cube in Hoxton, London until May 10th, 2008.

Go to Polly Morgan's Website +

Read more from the Telegraph +

See Morgan's Flickr photostream +

Tia Resleure's Case of Curiosities, specialising in Victorian and Edwardian case restorations and fanciful taxidermy creations with vintage flair and fairy tale imagery for the collector of curiosa.  The website also features a particularly fine collection of nineteenth-century theatrical taxidermy, including the works of Walter Potter, Hermann Ploucquet, and others.

Katinka Simonese (aka Tinkebell) has created a reverible dog-cat thing known as Popple.  The idea for this Popple came from a reversible teddy bear with the same name manufactored in the 80s. From her website: "Made from specially prepared cat and dog skin, the work shows us the impossible linking of the heart-warming imperfection of the
natural animal and the artificiality of our perception of the 'ideal' pet, as a commodity, a toy."

Tinkebell's work revolves around this "consumptive attitude that (post)modern man has taken on in relation to pets," that is, the ways that the pet has been commodified into the perfect accessory to social life, as well as the hypocrisy within our various relationships with animals including those forged by animal right activism.  [read more and see more +]