“What are we? We are butchers and we are chopped meat.”
-Simon Schama on the work of Francis Goya
Long before modern museums and private art galleries, the wonders of the world were captured and catalogued in the elaborate wunderkammers of the wealthy and curious. Stuffed armadillos, unicorn horns and dubious scientific instruments presented a rich and bountiful idea of the world, ripe for human exploration and exploitation. Far from scientific, these collections were akin to playgrounds of the mind, venues in which wealthy collectors could map out their own novel spectacles of existence. These curiosity cabinets, not unlike the fantasies of children, presented a vision of nature corrupted by the forces of imagination, wonder and innocence.
Existing in a blurred space between child’s room and wunderkammer, my work explores these paradoxes of innocence and corruption, creating a similarly peculiar image of a world replete with imagination, curiosity and frankensteinian hubris. These are exaggerated in my work, creating distorted visions of toys and real animals that become cancerous and disjointed through their manipulation. The smaller insect specimens are jewel-like, and while the animals on shelves take on the presence of dolls, the life-size constructions are confrontational figures that evoke the presence of the animals they reference.
Stuffed animals come to us already heavily laden with meaning. In childhood, we are comforted by their tactile softness and by the sympathetic human natures we lovingly project upon them. My fragmentation and reconstitution of these objects upturns these associations, creating a space of discomfort where the familiar once existed. As in the works of Mike Kelly and Annette Messenger, who also employ stuffed animals in their work, this fragmentation of familiar objects can surface darker sentiments and truths, evoking anything from playful sadism to much more violent realms of exploited labor and child abuse.
Blurring the boundary between child’s toy and embalmed animal brings the nature of both these objects into question. Taxidermy is death playing at life. Emptied of its vitals, it embodies our desire and failure to truly embalm the past. The violence inherent in the transformation of a living animal into a precious but dead object for display further complicates the nature of our relationship with the stuffed animal.
While the discarded toys of my stuffed animals evoke a recognizable, even comfortable realm, their fragmented constructions and hybrid natures disturb this familiarity, creating a visual language at once violent and familiar, dead but alive.