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

led me to her silver Citroën van and lit a roll-up, then we drove to her house in each other's sunglasses.

She sounded tough. Every other word was "fuck" or "bloody hell." Yet her lips trembled when she spoke, as if she had just consumed a pot of espresso, and peeking above her boots were her trademark hot-pink socks. At the crossroads of two dairy farms, in the minuscule village of Guilt Cross, we pulled into a gravel driveway that led to what looked like a huge brick factory (seventy-six windows and fifty-six radiators): Mayer's house. This 1906 workhouse hospital originally treated poor boys with tuberculosis. In old photos, the yard is filled with consumptive patients lying on cots, getting some fresh air (a common treatment for TB).

Now it contains animal corpses for Damien Hirst and Mayer's other clients, who include grieving dog owners, the bad-boy celebrity chef Marco Pierre White (who once sent a three-foot pike here by chauffeured car), and the odd skeleton collector, bat enthusiast, or lobster freak. When Mayer bought the workhouse in 1995, it was being used to store grain for neighboring farms. After years of renovations, she and Loker have transformed it into two artists' studios, each with its own kitchen, bedroom, and freezer—one for meat ("domestic"), the other for carcasses ("Emily's").

I followed Mayer inside. The place was dark and cold, a maze of long corridors. Her five terriers went nuts, running frenetic circles around her. "That's Alice. Her father fucked her aunt, which makes her inbred," she said with a jarring bluntness. Visiting Mayer for the first time is something like being at the dentist's after he's given you "sweet air" and you're smiling as he drills your teeth. I went upstairs to unpack. My room had a view of grazing Holsteins. On the nightstand was a worn paperback by Nicholas Parsons, Dipped in Vitriol, an anthology of "hatchet art reviews." The cover had a picture of a smashed tomato on it.

After lunch, she led me to her two-story studio, called Flying Bear. Upstairs, in a minimally finished attic that resembled an art gallery, are her sculptures. It is a group show by a single artist. I glanced at her seven iridescent rooks (taxidermic) perched on a weather-beaten fence post, then examined her crowlike bird surgically assembled out of scraps of old leather and bits of rusty metal. The crow, one of her found-object sculptures, was abstract yet somehow conveyed more life than the taxidermy. Indeed, it revealed someone who is uncannily in tune with animals—not just their glossy coats but the inner movement of every muscle, tendon, and bone.

Downstairs is her workshop, the kind of job shop where you'd expect to see a carpenter turn wood on a lathe or a mechanic rebuild an engine. It's a well-organized clutter of paints, saws, tools, drills, credit cards (used as resin scrapers), and Frankenstein-like chemistry setups with heat lamps, funnels, thermometers, handwritten formulas, and plastic bins for rotting carcasses: erosion-molding equipment.

We passed bird skulls and death masks and boxes of mummified weasels and stoats that she used to pick off of hedgerows as a kid (some now hung on her bedroom door). Above a window hung a mummified cat, all dried up and sinewy, like something you'd see in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And lying on the floor was the glossy head of a black horse that looked as if it had just been axed off. I glanced at its teeth, slightly visible through slack lips. Mayer grinned but offered no explanation.

"Ugh! That's dead!" I shrieked when we came upon a sleeping foxhound. The dog was curled up near a radiator. It looked so peaceful, so alive, that I petted it to be sure. It was as hard as fiberglass. "I like things in repose," she said coolly. "I like that disturbance factor. If it had glassy eyes, then you'd know it wasn't alive." The calico cat, on the other hand, was obviously dead. One of her failed experiments (she keeps them), it had shattered like a broken plate; furry shards lay on her worktable awaiting reassembly. "I had more of a headache with that fucking pussycat than I needed. It was a bloody nightmare!" she groaned.

Mayer does preserve dogs and cats. She preserves dogs and cats for the same reason other taxidermists are afraid to: she enjoys the challenge of replicating the expression of an animal that someone once knew intimately. (And since her mounts satisfy pet owners, she doesn't get stiffed—another reason taxidermists won't mount pets these days.) Mayer's canines are so spot-on that they even fool live dogs. Her terriers actually curl up with the cast foxhound and fall asleep. That said, Mayer will preserve pets for only one of two reasons: as a humanitarian gesture for a bereaved pet owner who absolutely needs an effigy of that animal to remember it by, and, of course, for art.

Outside Mayer's workshop is a small annex with huge doors that she had installed to accommodate massive carcasses. That day the room was blocked with an orange barrier that said no entry. It was her current Hirst project, which she was bound not to show until it was finished. I was disappointed. As captivating as Hirst's sculptures are while on exhibit at the Guggenheim in Bilboa, the Tate Britain, or any of the world's other leading bastions of contemporary art, I was far more interested in the process of how they are made—the messy, complicated part that a museum would never show. I mentioned how frustrating it must be to work in secret for years. She shrugged. "There [are] times when I'm glad my tongue is tied so I don't have to talk about it—especially at parties. It gets exhausting, people asking what's the biggest animal you've ever stuffed. So I don't say I'm a taxidermist anymore. If someone asks what I do, I just say I'm a sculptor and I occasionally work with dead animals," she said.

Taxidermists are notoriously