Taxidermy Workshop
I have always been drawn to the aesthetics of museums and art galleries. I love a glass case, cabinets of drawers filled with butterflies, a crisp white room, a simple white plinth. I’m fascinated by ‘cabinets of curiosities’ or Wunderkammers, precursors to museums, where collectors sated their curiosity about the natural world with a profusion of miscellaneous objects devoid of life. Coral, feathers, gems, minerals, eggs, nests, skeletons, wet specimens, and taxidermy. I understand that desire as I have always been a collector of nature. Picking up feathers, seed pods, blown down nests, or tiny broken eggs. Along with these interests I fell in love with taxidermy as a way of making nature visible. A way to get close to the beauty of an animal you may otherwise never see or get so close to. I find the history of the great age of discovery fascinating, and the desire to collect, name, describe and understand the entire world. Scientists estimate that 2 million species have been so named, with another 50 million remaining. The natural world is a disappearing wonder.
There is a brilliant book by Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the cultures of longing, that will appeal to those with an interest similar to mine. In it, Poliquin speaks to the way taxidermy is entwined with human longing to find meaning with and within the natural world. She speaks of our longing for wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory and remembrance. Taxidermy is a way to contain nature, to save something from decomposition, and remember it. It is part science and part art. The taxidermied remains carry their death with them and are neither animal or object.
I have been studying the taxidermy remains of birds in a laboratory at the Queensland Museum. Sketching, photographing and measuring them as part of the process of creating a speculative archive of the endangered and threatened bird species of Logan, Queensland. To get a deeper understanding of the process I recently attended a two day workshop in Aratula at @riverleigh_taxidermy to learn from taxidermist Tom Sloane. At it’s simplest, taxidermy involves removing the skin from the bird, while retaining it’s feet, skull and wing bones, then creating an armature to fit inside the skin. However, it is a skilled process of many steps, and any imprecision in each step adds up to a less satisfactory result at the end.
Creating my own taxidermy specimens has given me such an appreciation and insight into the skills involved, and an even deeper appreciation of the species I have taxidermied. I know it is not for everyone, but if it is something that interests you I highly encourage you to take a taxidermy course too.
(The European Starling is an introduced pest, and came from Tasmania after being shot on a cherry farm.)