New Stuff.

Works in Progress

Here are a few pieces I've been working on for a show in Brooklyn opening this week.



This is the bear paw I was administering a manicure to recently.  While making the pice in my mind I was thinking about bears leaving the woods and coming into suburban areas in search of food.  I imagined the bears deciding they like suburban life and getting mani/pedis alongside the soccer moms.  Do soccer moms still exist?  Is that even a relevant term?







I went to the Wagner Institute recently for a lecture on taxidermy.  While there, I took in the massive shell collection.  The notion of combining mammals with shells struck me nad this is the first in a series.







Here is a bufflehead duck; her neck is stretched as an experiment.  I found it extra tricky to get the feathers to lay correctly while stretching the dermis in this fashion but the finished product came out OK.







Finished pieces to be posted shortly.

Manicures for bears and busted skulls

I skinned two ducks the other day; the guy who shot them really did a number on one in particular.  I originally was going to post some pre-skinning pictures but it occurred to me that it might be a tad too graphic.  Let's just say that the head was crushed, legs were broken and wings were bent.  Definitely a fixer-upper.



Here's the skull itself; perhaps you can imagine how distorted it may have looked with the skin on.







I actually don't mind so much when the head's a bit smashed; it makes the skull easier to clean as I don't feel the pressure to be so gentle with all the little nooks and crannies.  Every time I clean a bird skull, I hear my instructor's voice in the back of my head: "Just attack it.  Attack that skull."  And that's what I do.  I get it as clean as possible and have even developed some of my own techniques post-school to achieve maximum spotlessness.  Ducks have a fair amount of brains, (of which extracting is my favorite part of the process) and I'd like to try brain tanning sometimes soon.



After spending two days skinning the chicken and the two ducks (most seasoned taxidermists would have had all three skinned, degreased and mounted in one day, by the way) I couldn't get my mind out of the dissection zone and everything around me was looking like a specimen.  This happens to me from time to time and it can be difficult to shake.  I look at everyone's knees and see the tendons I've so effortlessly been slicing on birds.  I feel around my throat with my hand and conjure a mental image of a my slit wind pipe, open and exposed right next to my draining jugular.  I pet my cats and think how easily the tail skin slips right off the bones of a mouse.



As grotesque and disturbing as it may sound, please rest assured that I am not about to go all Norman Bates on everyone.  I'm just seeing things very anatomically right now.  Once you become intimate with the sight, smell and touch of the insides of a creature ( a mouse's delicate and miniature intestines, for example) you don't look at them the same.   I'm sure Med students must go through this in spades.



Speaking of mice:







These guys/this guy isn't finished yet; I still need to fix up the faces and add in eyes.  Its kind of a Siamese twin mouse.  I bought these feeder mice (already dead and frozen) from a pet shop; and intend to throw the carcasses into the alley down the way for all the hungry stray cats so they won't go to waste.



And while all this was going on I was adding coat after coat of polish to my bear paw.  It took some brainstorming to devise a method in which I could paint the nails without the fur getting in the way, but I'm on the right path.







Finger condoms!

Hen Party

Back in school, my instructor gifted me a hen of his that had dropped dead one morning after dutifully laying eggs for however long hens typically live.  He mentioned the death that morning in class and of course I asked him what he was doing with the body.  He laughed and said his wife was too attached to do anything aside from bury it.  Wouldn't you know though; after lunch he came back to the work-shop with a bulky, ten pound plastic bag and said "don't say I never did anything for ya."



He suggested mounting it in a little nest and selling it to a stall at the farmers market for a display and I was all YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWN.



This baby's gonna be laying some fabrigee eggs if I have anything to say about it.  Which I do, because I'm the one mounting it.  I intend to make her  into the piece I'm submitting for a group show at a local gallery for an upcoming show called "Other Nature."  I'm going to attempt to capture the moment the egg actually exits the body so I've been watching reference videos online and getting my facts straight.  Have you ever watched a chicken lay an egg?  It's pretty gnarly.



It took her two days to thaw out; and I commenced skinning yesterday.  It was going great until I was down near the legs, working on getting the tail disconnected and I felt a stream of cold liquid gush down my arm.  At once my nose told me it was piss.  Chicken piss.  I must've punctured the bladder somewhere or something but the stench had me gagging.  I can pretty much stomach  any odor but urine remains my Achilles heel as far as my iron stomach goes.  I've lived in a city for almost half of my life and I still gag and shudder every time I walk by a patch of wino-piss on a sidewalk or alley.



I wiped off my arm, burnt some sage and kept on truckin'.



I'm no fan of cleaning skulls; it's dirty and laborious.  I do find it very fascinating though.  Here is a chicken tongue:







I drew a sight line from the newspaper image's face indicating where the portion which would be exposed from the beak-view is.  The rest is all in the back of the mouth/throat.  I guess that's  how our tongues lay?  The hole in the back interests me; I wonder what purpose it serves.  If I ever want to compete, I'll need to learn how to pickle tongues.  Prefab plastic parts are a big no-no.



Here she is, skinned.  Her feathers are so beautiful and soft; I very much look forward to taxi-ing the skin on a form.







I'm debating on leaving her ID band on her ankle, in honor of where she came from.



Another view of feathers:

Sitting Pretty

On a positive note, I successfully finished mounting one of two Starlings for a custom order today.  It gives me great satisfaction to emerge on the successful side of a challenge like this.  Dying them was an adventure unto itself and getting the feathers to lay correctly while mounting (post-coloring) was tricky.  I had to make my own forms because mannekins simply aren't available in this size; but any purist in the industry chooses to make their own bodies anyway.







This is number one, carded and setting.  It's hard to see the eyes but I'll get a better picture after I remove the plastic and touch up the face.







This is my first custom order as a licensed taxidermist.  I feel like I should frame the cash that I'll receive as payment and hang it on my wall.  Maybe I'll photocopy it.

Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Some horse "legs" arrived in the mail the other day and I thawed one out the other night to see if I could turn it into a human shoe.  I've had an obsession with pretending to be a horse for years; and although I am aware the wearable horse shoe has been done, I will not be at rest until I get a crack at it myself.  Plus, I want to try working with every kind of creature.



Here is the leg, thawed out.







The odor of barn filled my studio immediately and I rather enjoyed it.  Unfortunately I may have bit off more than I could chew...







It took me about thirty minutes to realise that I really had no plan and wasn't entirely sure of what I was doing at all.  I managed to skin the leg down to the hoof, but then had to cut the hide away as it would not invert around said hoof.  That's fine; it shouldn't be much of an issue to reattach, but once I managed to sever the hoof from the rest of the leg, I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.  A crash course in horse anatomy is basically what this project has turned into.



Here's the hoof, with spongy tissue and miscellaneous cartilage/bones still inside:







I've managed to cut out all the flesh I can with a knife, but it's not enough space to work a partial shoe into.  I got frustrated and had to leave it for a couple days; tomorrow I will tackle it with a drill.  That will smell totally awesome, I'm sure of it.

My fingers smell like horse shit.

But I skinned and mounted a bear paw today.  They smell because I just took a horse leg out of the freezer to thaw for tomorrow morning.  (horse-platform heels, world. BB style.  Look out.)  The leg was clean but even frozen that sweet smell of BARN just punched me in the face.



Anyway, back to the bear paw-it was really neat to touch a part of a bear when I've never even seen one in person.  Feeling the claws; I could easily imagine  it slicing my face to pieces.







As I skinned it, I marveled over how similar the actual anatomy seemed to my own hand.







Working with the bear was also a nice reprieve from the marathon of starlings over the weekend; the skin was thick and tough and very pleasant to work with.  While I enjoy the process of working with birds; I consider it significantly more difficult to mount than a less delicate specimen like mammoth fur paw.







Here it is, fleshed out:







I made a form and mounted the paw, sewed it shut and am now in the process of embellishing git to the desired effect.  I have 5 pieces in two shows coming up very soon; I just have to make the pieces.

Black birrrrd, FLY.

I have starlings to skin/play with/practice on so I skinned and dyed a bunch of them assembly style.  There was an alumni event at school from my previous life which I attended Friday night and I thought it would be wise for me to wear something of my own creation and come armed with business cards.  Here's some of the prep:



It fakes me out every time when I see how pathetic the skin looks past-rinsing when I can't imagine if coming together and looking like a bird again.







All the starlings, laying out.







I used one for my head piece, here it is mounted and posed.







After that I added eyes, and some accents.  Pictures of it actually in someone's hair to come...

Black Bird Pie!

I'm not sure why but Black Bird Pie seems fitting for Easter time.  Maybe it's my mind making the connections between Jesus supposedly returning from the dead and emerging from that tomb, with the birds flying out of that pie.  It was the last thing people expected to see, I'm sure.  Some cursory searching online shows that the two have nothing to do with one another but I decided to mae the blackbird pie for Easter, regardless.  Here's the poem:

Sing a song of sixpence AKA blackbirds in a pie

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king? The king was in his counting house counting out his money, The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes, When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose! Apparently: "During the Medieval times, there were occasions when the cook in the house of a wealthy knight did indeed put live birds (often pigeons, but I'm sure it could just as easily have been blackbirds) inside a huge pastry crust, on his own initiative. This was seen as a great joke and the cook would usually have a real pie waiting to bring in when the birds had been released."

So here's my cook, mashing potatoes in with ham and Starling meat, which was then spooned into phyllo dough cups and baked with cheddar cheese on top.  I had two of my girlfriends take over after my competency in the kitchen came under serious question and it was decided that I should simply observe.







While the pies baked, some friends dropped by and joined me in dying eggs.























Later we trickled into the kitchen and tested the pies.  While some of my friends loved them, others refused to try, and my husband and I both voted them as tasting too gamey.  Next time I will marinate the Starling in some sweet wine at least a day in advance, instead of the rush job I did for this occasion, substituting tonic water and agave syrup for the wine I didn't have around.  All is not lost however; the cats practically bit my fingertips off trying to get some of the little morsels so at least the leftovers have a place to go.



This week I'll be skinning out the rest of the black birds and studying them.  I may have an order on deck for one or two, and I intend to use a few others in a hairpiece which I will hopefully finish in time for an event I've got to attend on Friday.

Adventures in Home Tanning

Most taxidermist send their hides to a tannery; it makes sense when the skins start piling up and the work looks daunting.  Plus, home tanning takes time and effort.  I figured I only have a couple of green hides though so I'd try it myself.



The process takes about three days, and I diligently checked and stretched my raccoon and deer cape each day at the same time.  The coon skin, being thinner, took less time and I was exceptionally pleased with the final result:







Here he is, drying out in our bathtub.  This situation right here has me convinced that I will have to employ a professional tanner in the future, as my house is tiny and the bathtub meant for people.







Here's the deer cape drying out the next day.  Unfortunately, I must've skinned it after some bacteria had taken up residence, because the fur was coming out in clumps.  I was somewhat beside myself seeing as this was the first deer I'd skinned all by myself and I was really gunning for a A+ hide, so I shoved it in the freezer for me to take out and deal with another time.







At least the raccoon was a success.  I taxied the skin onto the form; it's in a climbing position with some tight corners.  Sewing was definitely a challenge.  Here's his face, all pinned and carded up for drying.  This is a piece commissioned to me by my husband and he requested a mischievous sort of creature in the midst of a getaway after a bank heist.  I turned the lip up just a liiiiitle bit to indicate a grin, and the $ bag is almost done and ready to be attached to one of his little paws.







I spent about an hour blow-drying the fur; it seemed to take forever. But he dried very well and is hanging in my studio.  Today I will touch up his face and finish him.  Updates to come.