Dead, Cold & Stuffed...

There is something sufficiently peculiar about the lifelike posturing of animal skins that draws me. I don't love taxidermy. I don't collect it. But I do find it irresistible.

It’s a sort of unsettling fascination.

Like a moth irresistibly drawn towards a naked bulb, I am all-consumed. Some might say obsessed. I visit natural history museums and stare at collections adorning the living room walls of private homes. I've seen the beautiful, the devastating and the repugnant. I have seen haunting works of contemporary art and ancient animal remains lost in almost-forgotten museums. I’ve seen all sorts, met all sorts (One person admitted he had smoked the ashes of his dead cat), all because of the unnerving charisma of long dead animals. A thing can only fascinate for as long as it retains its inexplicable magnetism. And the cold, dead and stuffed do hold a bizarre, unavoidable attraction.

We've all had an encounter with taxidermy, whether a museum specimen, a hunting trophy, or a piece of contemporary art. Give the animal more than a passing glance and instantly one knows something of taxidermy's uncanny mesmeric presence, the way it draws the eyes and demands attention. One can't ignore a stuffed parrot on the mantelpiece with the casual ease one might overlook a ceramic vase, and my fascination with taxidermy is really an obsessive quest to explain why.

Why does the artistic recreation of an animal using the animal's own skin create such eerie animal-things?

I'm a meat-eater,wear leather shoes and carry my life in leather pouches. Like most of us, I use all sorts of animal product in my daily life, but  taxidermy strikes me as something completely "other," something stranger, darker, more provocatively intimate and alluring than anything I have ever encountered. Taxidermy captivates me against my will, and I can’t look away until I know its secrets.

And this is all I know: all taxidermy is an unnerving and unknowable thing.

Although requiring death, it is not motivated by brutality but a longing to capture animal beauty. It is motivated by the desire to tell ourselves stories about who we are and our place within the larger social and natural world. It is driven by what lies beneath animal form, by the metaphors and allegories we use to make our world make sense.

Taxidermy is gesture of remembrance: the beast is no more....

(to be continued)