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

At seventeen, Mayer realized that her fascination with dead animals was more than a morbid predilection, perhaps even something of a gift. It was 1977, and she was waiting for the school bus, when she saw a dog get hit by a car and die. She carried the dog to the owners and gently broke the news. They were grateful, and soon Mayer was hanging out with them on their porch, drinking port, smoking pot, and complaining about how bored she was in school. ("I'm a maker of objects; I'm not intellectual," she says.) She wanted to drop out and become a taxidermist. "Do it then! Stop going to school and do it!" said the man, whom she describes as a rebel from a wealthy family. And so she did just that and has never regretted it, although one teacher told her she'd never be a taxidermist without advanced courses in biology and art. "And so I proved her wrong; I refused to be discouraged," she said.

That summer Emily worked as an apprentice taxidermist at World of Nature, in North Yorkshire, a zoo and a private museum housed in a converted mill. There was a window through which the public could watch taxidermy—or, rather, what minimally passed for taxidermy. World of Nature, you see, had the whiff of a circus. The owner was a former strongman who got his animals—including his pet lion, Libra—from his circus world contacts.

At World of Nature, Mayer learned how to skin eyelids, ears, and lips. She discovered, after skinning a rotten tortoise, that she had the requisite strong stomach for the task. Mostly she learned what not to do: break squirrel noses to enhance their cuteness; mount snarling stoats with one arm raised (like a toy); or implant teddy bear eyes in fox faces.

One day after she was told to flesh an elephant with a blunt skinning knife, Mayer quit. She returned to Greenwich for a time, then moved to Norfolk, where she freelanced doing taxidermy for schools and fox-hunt kennels and hung out at the pub with the local plumbers and builders. Then her efforts started to unravel. Glass eyes looked "glassy"; dog noses, dry; cat ears, opaque (when they ought to be translucent). And the faces—the tender windows onto an animal's soul—looked hard, not soft and fleshy. Mayer grew restless; the task of merging art and nature never seemed more illogical or unattainable. So she did something she had always found rather repugnant: she enrolled in art school. There she studied the energy of movement, discovering in sculpture what was missing in her taxidermy: her own interpretation.

It's as natural for a taxidermist to become a sculptor as it is for an actor to direct. Almost inevitably, taxidermists go the way of the nineteenth-century French animaliers (painters or sculptors of animal subjects) and cast animals in bronze. When Carl Akeley, Robert Rockwell, and David Schwendeman (briefly) each took up sculpture, they did bronze casting. To Mayer, however, nothing was more confining than what was essentially metal taxidermy. Until she met Damien Hirst, the only animal sculptures that inspired her were Picasso's assemblages.

Then one day she read about erosion molding. It was taxidermy in reverse: working from the outside of an animal in, dispensing with the derm. She explained the method to me using a dog as an example.

You take one dog, preferably dead, and position it in a way that you want the thing to end up looking. You can do it either fresh or frozen. Small mammals are better to do frozen, because they'll hold their shapes. Then you coat the dog's fur with silicone.

"What about rigor mortis?" I asked.

"It doesn't really last. Otherwise, people would die in really weird shapes, and you wouldn't be able to fit them in coffins, would you?"

After applying the silicone, you bolt a support-jacket mold around the coated carcass so it will hold its shape while the body decomposes, or "slips." The idea is to decompose the skin uniformly, so that when you remove the carcass from the mold, you are left with a hollow rubber shell that is the exact duplicate of the animal, with the fur embedded in it. A dog takes about a week to slip. It releases first from the belly, where there is a lot of bacteria. (The bacteria take longer to reach the ears, eyelids, toes, and extremities.) The smell is vile.

Mayer hand-casts every wart and freckle. So if a dog's belly has patches and splotches, she paints them into the mold. If it has one pink toe and three black toes, she casts each toe separately. Quite a bit of chemistry goes into erosion molding, because anytime you alter a batch of silicone resin to change the color, for example, or the tactility (the material's strength), the curing time may also change. Mayer has spent more than a decade fine-tuning the process. She knows how the material will react if changed by a tenth of a gram. "I can't have a piece for Damien discolor in five years," she says. "It has to be archival."

Her first erosion mold, in 1985, was for a pig farmer in Metfield, Suffolk (prime farm country), who wanted the head of his prized Berkshire-Peiron cross mounted as a memento. Mayer wanted to capture its fine details, but a pig's skin, like a primate's, has soft, hairless folds and wrinkles that would show imperfections if mounted conventionally. She suggested erosion molding but warned the farmer that she might "cock up." Mayer rarely cocks up. The pig was fabulous; the farmer was ecstatic. Then Mayer enrolled in art school and forgot all about erosion molding until Damien Hirst hired her to make a replacement severed cow head for A Thousand Years.

That was in 1998, five years after Marco Pierre White introduced them. The first animal Mayer mounted for Hirst was an upright grizzly bear posed in the Victorian style for Last Night I Dreamed That I Didn't Have a Head (Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao). (She