Bits and Pieces

I spent a full day in my studio working on some different projects, one of which was the very special canine.  While I had skinned the dog a couple weeks ago, I didn't have a chance to thoroughly get down to it so I had to stash the skin in the freezer for a bit.  Yesterday I thawed it out and got down to degreasing.  I was reminded of my racoon experience, with the amount of fat I had to scrape off.  I don't want to get too graphic because this dog was loved by people so deeply, but after working on the pelt for almost five hours I feel like I may have developed a Popeye forearm from the repetitive and forceful motion the degreasing process requires.



Alas, it is done and now the future work of art is resting in a tanning solution.



After that was finished I moved onto a small rabbit I'd skinned a while ago.  Sometimes I'll do a crude skinning of a specimen and then freeze the pelt just to free up some room in the icebox. This basically involves just getting the carcass out.  Later on I'll go back and scrape the fat, split the ears, nose and lips, etc.  Splitting ears on small mammals takes finesse and patience.  See how delicate this is?  That dark thing is my tool inside the ear.







The goal is to separate the front and back tissues of the ear.  After the skin is treated, a firm material is placed in side the ear to keep its shape.



 



I skinned two squirrels to fill an order for a client and froze the pelts.  I salted the meat in the fridge over night and this morning threw it all in the crock pot for some slow cooking.  Were this for me, I would've marinated it for a couple days however the dish I was creating would be for my cats.  I've been playing around with making my own cat food for some time now; usually I'll just feed them scraps of whatever we have, but I've never actually made a whole mixture.  I read a rant in one of the local weeklies. years ago, about how keeping cats as pets is one for the least environmentally friendly things one could do. The author came off as a bit unhinged but the idea always stuck with me; that I was using can after can after can and feeding my little guys fish and chicken raised and processed who knows where/how.  I have a friend who made his own food after his cat was diagnosed with cancer and she lived well past the vat's predicted expiration date.  I've been reading The Natural Cat and followed the basic recipe's amount for protein, veggies and starches.  I mixed the squirrel with some quinoa and pureed garbanzo beans, and will add vitamins later as well as some pureed carrots.  Here is the almost finished product, though, and I let the boys sample it already.  They both seemed very, very happy.

Man's best friend

I've never owned a dog, yet I feel a connection with them which compels me to stop at dog parks and slobber at the sight of the happy creatures leaping and bounding, exploding with happiness.  When a friend contacted me recently to inform  me about a friend of his whose dog had just passed, and would I be interesting in collecting the body, I jumped at the chance.  The dog, 14-year-old black and white rat terrier, died in her sleep on Saturday and I picked her up on Sunday.  It was a most unusual way to meet someone but the owner, a lovely woman with two children and a chef husband, was graceful and composed so I followed her lead.  The dog was on her deck, on ice and in a blanket.  I kept her in the bags and then loaded her into a large IKEA carrier sac for transport.  I had imagined that the specimen would be much smaller but when the weight and size of this one hit me, it became apparent I had to take a cab home.  Slouched in the back seat of a taxi, I leaned against my cargo and caught a whiff of some early decomposition odor.  Still hung over from the night before, the smell made me gag a bit and I wondered just how infuriated the driver would be if he knew what I'd brought into his car.  At moments like this it hits me, how bizarre and twisted my little world might appear from the outside.  So much of my time is spent retrieving dead things and carting them around in my messenger bag, then stashing them in my freezer.  Sometimes I wonder if there are hundreds of little ghosts drifting around the house that make my cats go bananas.  To some, I'm sure this seems sick.  However, this is my normal, and I simply forget that people might see me as a very disturbed individual until quiet times like this in which I occupy a tight space with a dead dog I've never met and a man driving  a cab who I'll most likely never meet again.



It turns out there was no room in the freezer for Pooch so I skinned her upon getting home.  The enormity of what I was about to do didn't hit me until I pulled her out of the bag.



Her collar was still on.



I started weeping and just stared at her, wondering if I could do it.  I get teary and cry a bit with almost every animal I skin, but this was different.  It was if I could feel all the love which had been poured into this creature for the last 14 years, and the profound role this four-legged little girl had had with her humans became clear.  I fondled  the paw pads a bit, imagining them padding around the wooden floor just a few days before.  I was a little bit afraid she wasn't completely dead (I always am, it's my worst fear that I'll make an initial cut and suddenly my specimen will come back to life, panicked and crazed) but the bloat in her stomach made it quite clear.  I burned some incense, said my little prayer and got to skinning.







It was an intense, emotionally wrought experience.  One interesting part was when I came across what I'm guessing is a tracking device that was implanted between the shoulder blades.  Aside from that, nothing too different from skinning a coon or a fox.  After I had the carcass completely separated, I marveled at how we're all just skins.  No one would ever recognise this naked corpse as a beloved pet.







For reference, this is a picture of the breed which I worked with.  Out of respect for the dog and her owners I chose not to take any pictures of the corpse.  I got my measurements and that's all I needed.  I hope to do her justice.

Special Delivery

I've been crafting a custom hairpiece for a very special gal the last couple weeks, in my spare time. I should've had it done by Sunday but I was given a unique specimen which was too large and too precious to keep in the freezer so I chose to put all other activities on hold so I could skin this...wonderful creature.  Full story to come shortly.  In the meantime, I was told by my client that she wanted a hairpiece for a gal pal of hers who enjoys wearing, of all things,ducks on her head.



What I want to know is, how have I not met this woman and if/when we do, will we both implode from the sheer weight of our shared sense of high fashion?



Her friend gave me a time and price range and we worked out this little ditty right here:







Sorry for the shadowy picture but I'll beg her to let me borrow it later to get a professional shot for my website.  I mounted a squirrel head onto the kind barette which is held into place with a stick driven through the hair.  Technically it's a bun holder but they work just fine for ponys and half ponys.  The squirrel was embellished with some jewelry and feathers, while his feet wound up dangling from the stick part.



 







 







Creating wearables seems to be more and more the direction which makes most sense for me.  Art is so much more accessible when you have it on your head!

Truly Outrageous

I've been buried in work and too busy making real life to make blog posts.  Now I just don't even know where to start. I have three new pieces and a newish one currently showing at the Vincent Michael Gallery in Philadelphia.  The fancy chicken, the squirrels, everything I've been working on has led to this.  And I could kick myself because i worked on them up until the last second and have not a single picture to show for my work.  That will have to come later, along with stories/though processes, for anyone who's interested in that type of thing.



The day of my opening, I wore a new head-piece to the Devon Dressage show to enter in the Ladies hat contest.  Here's a little video montage of how the day went:







And here is my victory lap:







From there I headed to the gallery opening which was a smashing success.  If I could ever say there was a day when I felt like Cinderella, that was it.  I didn't want the wonderful experience to end, but I grew quite sleepy at 9pm and overwhelmed by the social activity so I retreated to my neighborhood bar where I enjoyed a White Russian with my husband and called it an evening.



Currently I'm working on a custom piece for a client who found me via a site which promotes this blog, Swellco&Swellco.  They're unusual people but I love them dearly.  I've also got a custom order for a boxing squirrel.



A more extensive update with pictures to follow.

Hen Party

My local egg connection had the misfortune of losing one of his hens prematurely and he wasted no time letting me know.  One man's trash, as they say...



She was a fancy chicken, curly feathers and all and on the small side so I wonder if maybe she'd had some sort of defect from the start which limited her time with us.



The skin was thin but tough (like a wet swimsuit) and dreamy to work with.  I basically just pulled it off with my bare hands in no time at all; no delicate surgeon cuts necessary. Just another reason I love working with chickens.



 



Almost finished.  I love the messy and curly feathers; the whole thing reminds me of a Jim Henson puppet.







Look at that poof!  I have been dreaming of working with one of these ever since I met them and I am quite pleased with how she turned out so far.







Her feet are drying around balls of clay because I have something very special in mind...

Coho Mojo

My frequent sidekick-in-corpse-fun just got back from a two-day fishing jaunt up in NY and brought me back a beautiful 16lb Coho Salmon form the Great Lakes.  We decided that I'd come over for a BBQ and skin it so I could leave the meat with him, while we dined on dove.  I guess it didn't register with me just how large 16 pounds is; when I saw it sitting in his cooler I laughed and wondered how I was going to negotiate my way around such an impressive specimen.  Honestly, fish are not my forte and the ones I have mounted have been on the small side.







I adore this picture for two reasons, the first being that I'm wearing a shirt with a pig's head on it and the word "gluttony" underneath.  There are so many situations when I feel like just having this shirt on makes everything more funny.  Second, my hand.  In school, my teacher would constantly remark and tease me about my veiny bony hands which I secretly relished.  As a child I spent numerous weekends with my grandmother and my favorite part of her was her hands...I used to pray that someday I would get those same features; the thick, calloused skin and rope-like veins winding their way around the surface, over and under bones like tree roots.  I love my hands because they look as strong as they are and they help me to complete such a wide array of tasks.  They look more like my grandmother's with each passing year and it's one of the many little things that makes getting older so rewarding.



The first cut. Fish skin is pretty fun to work with if you can stomach the smell.  It;s touch and basically impossible to accidentally rip or tear, so you can get as rough as you want.







Apparently it was spawning season and this fish was just LINED with roe!  The Salmon  just stop eating in the last weeks of their lives so their stomachs will shrink to make room for the eggs. That is true dedication to procreation.



We saved the eggs, of course.  For caviar cat food.  Did I say cat food?  I meant, never mind, it's classified.  But that's a LOT of eggs.







 



 



 

This is what it sounds like-

A buddy of mine went dove hunting last week and brought me back a present.  This will be my second attempt at a mourning dove; the first one was a wash, a very humbling experience.  This one was...slightly better.



I can't quite articulate how fond I am of these colors...I want my hair to look like this.







That is actually a wood carving by Jim Childress but it gives a nice example the color and plumage.



Skinning doves is, like I said, a humbling experience.  The dermis is so thin and delicate.  It doesn't seem to withstand any of the gentle pulling and manipulating that I can get away with most other birds.  I wound up with my fair share of holes.  Dove doilies, I guess.



After tanning and fluffing I wound up with a shell worthy of a C+,  a few grades up from the D- my first one amounted to.  It can be really discouraging to see how many feathers get lost while skinning or how many holes I'll have to sew up later, but I really do love the process so much that even the missteps are moments I wouldn't wish to be spared of.



 



Here's the breast meat, marinating in a mixture of simple syrup and lemon juice.  I let it sit for two days. It was a very petite cut of flesh, but well worth fussing over.



I brought it over to a friend's house where a fish skinning event was to take place, and we barbecued the dove.  As you can see it was a hit.  A palette-whetter, if you will.