Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

School of Art and Design and a body of found-fragment sculptures the Times of London once compared to Ted Hughes's poetry. In Fishwick's words, "Anywhere you cut Emily's finger off, it will say 'art.'"

For years, Mayer was the only woman taxidermist in England. She was also the first female chair of Britain's Guild of Taxidermists, the professional organization devoted to promoting taxidermy in the United Kingdom. When I finally called her, she invited me to attend its upcoming convention in Nottingham. I knew that taxidermy had evolved differently in Britain, where it is a cottage industry with long ties to modern zoology, than in the United States, with its predominant hunting culture, and I wanted to meet the descendants of early British taxidermists, some of the country's most passionate animal lovers.

We decided to spend a few days at her house getting acquainted before the guild show. She'd tell me about herself and erosion molding, the technique she's perfected. The process is incredibly complicated (as I'd see on a later visit) but yields astonishing results. There's no manikin, since there's no skin to stretch over it. Instead, the inside of the animal is replaced with silicone (rubber); only the fur remains. Hirst likes the method because he can display animals submerged in water rather than toxic formaldehyde, and they won't rot or become tattered, theoretically eliminating the need for replacement tiger sharks.

Because Mayer herself is so edgy, people tend to call erosion molding cutting-edge. It's more accurate to say that Mayer has rediscovered a forgotten technique (the Smithsonian has used it on some primates) and has pushed it farther than anyone: to the frightening point, in fact, where art is indistinguishable from life. Score one for taxidermy. Except for this: since erosion molding dispenses with the "derm" (and derm-less taxidermy is technically not taxidermy), taxidermists disdain her work as modelmaking. To Mayer, the distinction is semantic. "As long as you get the results, who cares!" she snaps with a dismissive air that belies how completely possessed she is by the absurd quest for utter realism.

Hirst once told me that Mayer is the only taxidermist who can "make it real." But real for Mayer—a perfectionist who is completely unsentimental about animals in art—is nothing like a diorama, with its idealized nature. Real is really real, and reality is unsettling, because it is often ugly and macabre. She and Hirst share this morbid fascination. Hirst's sectioned cows and bisected sheep are often nothing more than the cut-up animal, yet they are considered shocking. Encased in glass, they are the opposite of a diorama and yet convey the same powerful clashing of beauty and death. Mayer, like Hirst, loves to push the disturbance factor. As she puts it, "Animals die and kill things, and they lick their asses, and they shit. They just do stuff a taxidermist won't show. Taxidermists are all about the beauty of the animal. But I find beauty in death!"

If you met Mayer, you wouldn't doubt that. Ever since she was a kid, she's been wildly unconventional—not outright rebellious or disobedient, simply determined to pursue her own dreams. And beginning when she was twelve, one of her dreams was to be a taxidermist. Born in 1960, the Chinese year of the rat, Mayer grew up in Greenwich, when that section of southeast London was seedy and working-class and attracted bohemian artists such as her parents, who let her turn her bedroom into what she called her museum. Mayer, who is still a compulsive scavenger (and eBay fanatic), filled the tiny room with eggs, bones, and especially animals—living, dead, common, exotic, incubated, dissected, mummified, decomposed, fossilized, skeletonized. ("I was doing this before bloody Damien Hirst," she jokes.) She skinned her first mouse when she was nine and preserved—and ate—her first bird (a gull) when she was eleven, much to the disgust of her brother and sister. On a high school career form, she wrote "taxidermist, pig farmer, and jack-of-all-trades." "They thought I was taking the piss!" she says, using the Briticism for making a joke. "I was serious!"

She cares not a wink if people think she's mad; at least they remember her. "I can ring up people from way back in my past and say, 'Hi, I'm Emily the taxidermist,' and they go, 'Oh, right. Yeah.'"

The first time she rang me was to get my flight information, and it took me forever to figure out who was on the phone. The voice on the other end was so deep and gravelly from chain-smoking that I thought it was Jack Fishwick pulling my leg. It's only now that I'm not completely flustered by the words "Emily here." Before I hung up, I asked if she wanted anything from New York: bagels, perhaps, or an IV NY T-shirt. She gave it a quick thought, then said definitively, "Novelty sunglasses with holographic rolling eyeballs."

I left New York for England on September 14, 2003. I caught the Norfolk train from London and took it to Diss, the closest stop to Mayer's house. It was balmy outside, and Diss station (a cement platform with an espresso machine) was deserted except for a man reading a newspaper. I paced back and forth in the fragrant heat, waiting for Mayer. Then I glanced up and saw a tall, imposing figure with short-cropped hair, dressed all in black, striding purposefully down the platform. With the heavy black work boots and black wraparound sunglasses, it was hard to tell whether the person was a man or a woman. He or she did not resemble a taxidermist. Then I saw the butcher knives glinting in the sun. It was Mayer, and the knives were her earrings.

She kissed my cheek in a way that was more London artist than rural taxidermist. I dodged the knives (she sharpens them). Unsure of what to say, I handed her the holographic sunglasses. She passed me the wraparounds, and when she did, I could see her elegant facial bones and huge, darkly expressive brown eyes. She