Read my article in TREK Magazine on my adventures with taxidermy.  A short teaser for you:

"No photographs exist from the taxidermy bonfires, but the picture is clear enough. A disorderly mountain of stiffened lion cubs, lemmings, civet cats and barking deer. A smouldering llama, a black tailed wallaby, a polar bear – more than two hundred Victorian stuffed beasts had been discarded as refuse. No museum would ever dream of burning its unpopular cultural artefacts, but these century-old pieces of nature had been heaped on top of each other and set ablaze.

I first heard about the bonfires in the spring of 2005, when I spent several weeks in England visiting family. I had recently finished my PhD at UBC in comparative literature and just wanted to see relatives, go for walks – anything but think about what was next. When I visited a little museum in the countryside, I never could have guessed that a lion with wooden teeth named Wallace, the first lion to be born in Great Britain (in 1812) and one of the few survivors of Saffron Walden’s bonfires, would determine the next six years of my work.

Opened in 1834, the Saffron Walden Museum is the second-oldest purpose-built museum in England. Throughout the 19th century, like so many Victorian museums, it collected and exhibited a random assortment of specimens: mummies, Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon swords, a motley array of stuffed beasts. The artefacts are still on display, neatly labelled and arranged behind glass. But with the exception of Wallace and a few birds, every once-living creature had been destroyed.

The story goes like this. In 1960, a young curator with a verve to modernize wrote a persuasive report to the Saffron Walden District Council. It was time to sluice out the museum’s taxidermy, which she viewed as musty relics from a less enlightened era. In an age before colour photography and wildlife documentaries, taxidermy had been the cutting-edge technology for showcasing the fauna of distant lands. But those days were long gone. She argued that television and zoos gave children a better idea of nature; taxidermy had become crassly old fashioned. Plus, 19th century taxidermy was shabby; no doubt more than a few hides were cracked with age and sprouting straw. And so, having convinced the council that the museum’s taxidermy was a nostalgic embarrassment, the vigorous young curator hauled the antique beasts to the city dump and lit a match. The bonfires lasted three days."

Read the whole article here: http://www.alumni.ubc.ca/2011/trek/2011-spring/the-beastly-art-of-taxidermy/

Iris Schieferstein was recently interview by Philipp Humm with Husk magazine.  Check out the interview at http://www.huskmagazine.com/ 

I think I mentioned this last year, but Mary Frey's exhibition catalogue of her Imagining Fauna series is now for sale.  The images reveal an almost forgotten taxidermy collection and are printed on black glass using an ambrotype process.  The catalogue includes an essay by me.  See (and maybe buy!) the catalogue here + 

http://www.blurb.com/books/813061

"It was during this period that both photo postcards were most popular and Americans experienced profound changes that altered their connection with animals. America was in transition from being predominately rural to a country dominated by cities, from a society where everyday contact with a variety of animals was common to one in which such contact was limited. Cars and trucks replaced horses. Viewing animals, other than pets, came to be done mainly in circuses, zoos and in the movies not in peoples’ own backyards. Food production became industrialized making the animals that are the source of our produce almost invisible. Our book documents the range of roles animals played from pets to vermin. We look at live as well as dead creatures, real as well as fantasy, loved and hated. We explore the contradictions, dualisms and paradoxes of our connection to animals, illustrating how animals were distanced and embraced, commoditized and anthropomorphized."

Accompanying the book is an online exhibit of some of the postcards inlcuded in the book.  Here is a quick sampling.  See more online here + 

My contribution to the volume, "Botched Animals and Enigmatic Beasts" explores the world of bad taxidermy and the sort of knowledge that could be squeezed out of their strangeness. 

Curious to know more?  Buy the book through my online bookstore here + or Cambridge Press here +

Trigger rides again!  Read Melissa Milgrom's article in Salon.com about the recent auction of Roy Roger's iconic horse, Trigger, and various other Roger memorabilia.  Click here + 

Apparently Trigger's reins went for $266,500. Wow. Read more here +  

Also make sure to check out Milgrom's new book - Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy published by Houghton Mifflin earlier this year.

http://www.magentamagazine.com/3/features/contemporary-zoological-conservatory

The CZC was also recently featured in a photo shot with author Yann Martel whose latest book, as you may or not already known, discusses taxidermy and the holocaust.  hmm.. 

"How did taxidermy become so hip? Melissa Milgrom on why the Victorian fascination with stuffing animals has become the hot new thing among hipsters and urbanites.

Sitting in Observatory, an art galley and events space in the newly hip Gowanus section of Brooklyn, Joanna Ebenstein clicked JPEGs of taxidermy that she has traveled the world to photograph. Her passion for the preserved is as far from country-kitsch as the toxic Gowanus is from the meandering Mississippi. “Taxidermy is more acceptable now. It’s the embarrassing thing in the basement, but now it’s cool.”

For Ebenstein and a growing number of urban enthusiasts, taxidermy is more than just a stuffed animal; it’s an experience, the tactile opposite of a world that communicates in bits and bytes. “It is a deeply intimate encounter,” explains Rachel Poliquin, curator and scholar, whose taxidermy blog Ravishing Beasts began as a post-doctoral project; now it gets around 800 hits a day. Last month, Poliquin curated a taxidermy exhibit at the Vancouver Museum; wildly popular, the exhibit aroused deep empathy for animals in a city the museum thought would balk at the show.

But you knew all of that already, if you're already reading this. Read the whole article at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-11/cool-dead-and-stuffed/?cid=topic:mainpromo1